History
CBC can trace its history back to 1920 when Eastern Bank, a British overseas bank, opened a branch in Ceylon. In 1957, Chartered Bank (another British overseas bank; see below) acquired Eastern Bank but ran it separately. Four years later, the Government of Ceylon forbade foreign banks to accept deposits from Ceylonese nationals. In response, Eastern Bank incorporated its branch under the name, Commercial Bank of Ceylon and took 40% of the equity. CBC got Mercantile Bank of India’s branches in Kandy, Galle and Jaffna as part of a deal that would remove the government’s limit on deposit taking in Mercantile’s remaining branches in Colombo and Pettah. The branches actually transferred in 1973. (HSBC had acquired Mercantile in 1959.) Then in 1971 Eastern bank amalgamated with Chartered Bank, which four years later merged with Standard Bank to form Standard Chartered Bank.
In 1997 Standard Chartered divested itself of its 40% stake in CBC. DFCC Bank (formerly Development Finance Corporation of Ceylon) acquired 29.5%.
In 2003, CBC acquired Credit Agricole Indosuez's two branches in Bangladesh at Dhaka and Chittagong to become the first Sri Lankan bank to establish operations outside the country. (Banque Indosuez had opened its branches in Bangladesh in 1980.) Also in 2003, the IFC bought 15% of the bank's share capital from Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation.
Read more about this topic: Commercial Bank Of Ceylon
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“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)