Banking in Lugano between the wars

The structure of 1920 and the Italian banks

The banking system that Ticino possessed after 1920 was the product of the crash of 1914. Chapter C.IV has described its elements: the Banca dello Stato with the guarantee of the canton, the Banca della Svizzera Italiana as the largest private bank of Lugano, the Banca Popolare di Lugano, the branches of the Swiss Bank Corporation, the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, the Swiss Volksbank and, from 1920, the Union Bank of Switzerland. The bankers organized themselves in the Associazione Bancaria Ticinese in the same year, the first Raiffeisen bank was founded in Sonvico in 1922 and the Swiss National Bank opened a branch in Lugano in 1929.¹ What distinguished Lugano from other Swiss regional centres was a further group of institutions: banks founded or controlled by Italian banking groups. The historian Pietro Nosetti records that the Banca Unione di Credito was founded in Lugano in 1919 by the Credito Italiano of Milan, and that in the same year the Banca di Roma opened a branch in Lugano.² The Banca della Svizzera Italiana had been founded in 1873 with the participation of the Banca Generale of Rome and later came under the influence of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, as Chapter C.IV explains. Thus by 1920 three of the four great Italian banking groups of the time had a foothold in Lugano. Nosetti places the first movements of Italian private capital towards Lugano and Ticino in this period.³ The Italian banks had good reasons to be present. Their clients in Lombardy and Piedmont wanted a channel for payments and investments in Switzerland. A Swiss subsidiary could also deal in Swiss francs, gold and foreign securities at a time when the Italian authorities had begun to control foreign exchange transactions in Italy itself.

The Italian banks and the crises of 1931–1934

The Italian banks that owned or influenced these Lugano institutions passed through a deep crisis at the beginning of the 1930s. The mixed banks, which combined deposit business with large industrial shareholdings, were overwhelmed by the depreciation of their industrial assets after 1929. According to the Bank of Italy's own account of its history, the State and the central bank saved the largest mixed banks from collapse, and the Istituto Mobiliare Italiano (IMI) and the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI) were created to take over medium-term finance and the banks' industrial shareholdings.⁴ Through IRI the Italian State became the owner of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, the Credito Italiano and the Banco di Roma.⁵ The Lugano subsidiaries of these groups were therefore indirectly controlled by the Italian State from the mid-1930s, an arrangement that continued into the post-war period. The ownership structure is worth noting because it explains a recurring feature of the Lugano market: Italian State-owned banks maintained Swiss subsidiaries whose business consisted in part of serving Italian residents whose money had left Italy in breach of Italian currency law. Chapter D.II takes up this paradox for the period after 1945.

Notes

1. Associazione Bancaria Ticinese, "Cenni storici", https://www.abti.ch/cenni-storici; Pietro Nosetti, "La réalité locale et internationale du secteur bancaire tessinois à travers le cas de la Banca Svizzera Americana (1896–1920)", paper for the 3es Journées suisses d'histoire, Fribourg 2013, https://infoclio.ch/sites/default/files/standard_page/nosetti2013.pdf. ↩
2. Nosetti 2013 (above): "Banca Unione di Credito, fondé en 1919 par le Credito Italiano"; "la même année, l'ouverture d'une succursale à Lugano de la Banca di Roma". ↩
3. Nosetti 2013 (above): "c'est à cette époque que les premiers capitaux privés italiens s'orientent vers Lugano et le Tessin". See also, for the period to 1939, Pietro Nosetti, Le secteur bancaire tessinois: origines, crises et transformations (1861–1939) (Neuchâtel: Alphil). ↩
4. Banca d'Italia, "Dall'istituzione alla legge del 1936", https://www.bancaditalia.it/chi-siamo/storia/istituzione/index.html: "Lo Stato e la Banca centrale salvarono dal tracollo le maggiori banche miste". ↩
5. Treccani, Enciclopedia on line, "IRI", https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/iri/: IRI, created by r.d.l. 5/1933, took over from the Banca commerciale italiana, the Credito italiano and the Banco di Roma and their financial companies the shareholdings they held in industry and services; Wikipedia (Italian), "Istituto per la ricostruzione industriale", https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istituto_per_la_ricostruzione_industriale (consulted as a last resort), on the three conventions of 1934 and: "l'IRI possedeva le tre maggiori banche italiane". ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.