Chiasso: a border town becomes a banking town

The border station and the first bank branches

Chiasso lies at the southern tip of the Mendrisiotto, on the frontier with the Italian city of Como. Its modern history begins with the Gotthard railway. Chapter C.III describes how the opening of the line in 1882 made Chiasso the international border station between the Swiss and Italian networks, with customs sheds, freight yards, forwarding agents and the money changers who served travellers and traders. Banking followed the railway. In 1908 the Swiss Bank Corporation (Società di Banca Svizzera) opened a branch in Chiasso, five years before the Kreditanstalt came to Lugano in 1913 and twelve years before the Union Bank of Switzerland arrived in Lugano and Locarno in 1920.¹ The big banks of Zurich and Basel thereby established themselves in the south at a time when the local banking system was collapsing, a story told in Chapter C.IV. For the next half century the Chiasso branches of the national banks were modest offices serving import and export firms, customs agents and the local population.

The town's position made it more than a railway junction. Chiasso was the first Swiss municipality reached by road and rail from Milan, which lies about fifty kilometres to the south. Anyone who wished to bring money from Lombardy into Switzerland could reach a Swiss bank counter in Chiasso in less than an hour, and a bank clerk in Chiasso could meet a client in Como over lunch. The same proximity that made the town a hub of legitimate trade made it a hub of the unrecorded movement of goods and currency across the frontier. Chapter A.IV treats the long history of smuggling on this border, and Chapter D.II the post-war generation of couriers who carried banknotes over the hills of the Mendrisiotto or in the luggage of commuters.²

Credit Suisse in Ticino

The Kreditanstalt had been founded in Zurich in 1856 under the leadership of Alfred Escher and had become the largest Swiss commercial bank by financing railways and industry. It began to open branches inside Switzerland in 1905, survived the banking crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War comparatively well and then grew rapidly, multiplying its offices at home and abroad.³ In Ticino its main office was in Lugano, but the Chiasso branch developed a business of its own. Its clients were mainly Italian residents who brought lire, banknotes or securities across the border and wished to hold them in Swiss francs or other hard currencies. The branch competed for these deposits with the branches of the other big banks, with the Ticinese banks and with the many smaller institutions that had been founded in Chiasso and Lugano since the 1950s.

By the 1970s, the Chiasso branch was among the most profitable units of the Kreditanstalt. Its success rested on the personal network of its director and on a range of services that went beyond the deposit and custody business of an ordinary branch. Contemporary accounts describe it as a branch that operated with unusual autonomy, whose managers knew their Italian clients personally and whose results impressed the head office in Zurich. Other banks in Ticino were less impressed. They complained that the Chiasso branch offered rates above those fixed in the interest-rate conventions that the Swiss banks then applied among themselves, and they regarded the methods of its director with suspicion.⁴

Notes

1. Associazione Bancaria Ticinese (ABTI), "Cenni storici", https://www.abti.ch/cenni-storici (Società di Banca Svizzera in Chiasso 1908, Credito Svizzero in Lugano 1913, Banca Popolare Svizzera in Locarno 1919, Unione di Banche Svizzere in Lugano and Locarno 1920). ↩
2. On the spalloni and the cash economy of the border see Chapter D.II, and on the older history of contraband Chapter A.IV. ↩
3. Baumann, "Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (SKA)", HLS (above): foundation in 1856 under Alfred Escher, branches inside Switzerland from 1905, comparatively good passage through the 1930s and the Second World War, followed by rapid expansion of offices at home and abroad. ↩
4. Le Temps, "Grandes affaires économiques suisses (26)" (above), which mentions complaints that the Kreditanstalt violated the interest-rate conventions and that Kuhrmeier's methods troubled other banks in Ticino. The article relies on Joseph Jung, Von der Schweizerischen Kreditanstalt zur Credit Suisse Group. Eine Bankengeschichte (Zurich: NZZ Verlag, 2000). ↩

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.