The Börsenverein of 1855 and the first Zurich market in securities

A merchants’ association with a public purpose

The decisive step in Zurich was taken in 1855, when merchants of the city founded the Börsenverein Zürich. The Historisches Lexikon lists the association among the modern business organisations that arose in the middle of the nineteenth century, after the old Kaufmännisches Direktorium of 1662.¹ The Swiss Finance Museum of SIX dates the founding of the “Zurich Stock Exchange Association” to the same year.² The year matters because it coincides with the founding of the Polytechnikum (Chapter D.III) and falls one year before the founding of the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (Chapter D.II). Within two years, Zurich acquired the three institutions on which its later position as a financial centre would rest: an organised market, a large commercial and investment bank, and a school that trained the engineers whose projects the market would finance.

The Börsenverein of 1855 was an association of merchants who met regularly to trade in goods, bills of exchange and, increasingly, in the new railway and bank securities. The centenary history of the exchange devotes separate chapters to the “Zürcher Börsenkomitee und der Börsenverein von 1855”, to the search for suitable premises, to the “silent burial” of the old legislation on brokers and to the development of the exchange, the association and the price list up to 1870.³ The chapter titles reveal the main features of the period. The association had to find rooms in which to meet, since Zurich had no exchange building. It published a price list (Kursblatt), which gave the prices at which transactions had been concluded and which became the first public reference for the value of Zurich securities. The older regulation of brokers, inherited from the Sensalenordnungen, fell into disuse without formal repeal, because liberal economic thinking and the freedom of trade that the regeneration period had introduced left little room for the corporative order of the Ancien Régime.

The centenary history places a chapter entitled “Ordnungszwang trotz Gewerbefreiheit” at the transition from the old brokerage to the new exchange. The phrase captures the problem that the Zurich exchange would face for the next half-century. Freedom of trade meant that anyone could in principle act as an intermediary in securities. A market in which prices were published and relied upon, however, needed rules on who might trade, how transactions were recorded and how disputes were settled. The Börsenverein answered this need at first through private rules binding on its members, which made the exchange a club of merchants and bankers whose authority rested on the reputation of those who belonged to it.

From the Börsenverein to the chamber of commerce

The Börsenverein soon became more than a trading association. It took part in the founding of the Schweizerischer Handels- und Industrie-Verein of 1870, which the Historisches Lexikon calls the most important Swiss business association for decades, set up on the initiative of export-oriented circles and with its seat in Zurich.⁴ In 1873 the Börsenverein took the initiative for the founding of an independently organised chamber of commerce, the Kaufmännische Gesellschaft Zürich, which took the name Zürcher Handelskammer in 1919.⁵ The Historisches Lexikon describes chambers of commerce as regional, mostly cantonal associations organised under private law, which represent the interests of industry, trade and services before the authorities and which gained new opportunities for influence through the federal constitutions of 1848 and 1874.⁶

This division of labour shaped the later exchange. Once the chamber of commerce took over the general representation of trade interests, the securities business could be organised separately. The centenary history accordingly follows its chapter on the chamber of commerce with one on “Die Gründung des Effektenbörsenvereins Zürich”, the association that would organise securities trading in the city until the late twentieth century. The sequence shows how the institutions of the Zurich financial centre grew out of each other: a merchants’ association produced a chamber of commerce, whose creation in turn freed the traders in securities to form an association of their own.

The market of the 1850s and 1860s

The securities traded at the meetings of the Börsenverein in its first two decades were, for the most part, the shares and bonds of the railway companies founded after 1852 and of the new banks. The Nordostbahn, formed on 1 July 1853 by the merger of the Schweizerische Nordbahn and the Zürich-Bodenseebahn under the leadership of Alfred Escher, was the largest Zurich issuer and the backbone of the local market.⁷ The Kreditanstalt, founded in 1856 to finance the textile industry and railway construction, gave Zurich a bank with the capital and the connections to underwrite large issues and to place them with investors.⁸ Insurance shares were added after the founding of the Schweizerische Rentenanstalt in 1857 and the Schweizerische Rückversicherungsanstalt in 1863, the companies that, in the words of the same article, established the insurance industry in Zurich (see Part E).

The Historisches Lexikon article on the capital market, written for the period after 1850 by Malik Mazbouri, sees the years between 1850 and 1870 as the time when new financial intermediaries appeared, among them the future large commercial banks, and when the principal exchanges of the country opened, with Geneva first in 1855.⁹ The dates given in the literature for the Geneva exchange differ slightly. The Historisches Lexikon article on exchanges, by Elisabeth Meyerhans, states that securities trading began in Geneva around 1850 and that a recognised exchange existed there by 1856.¹⁰ In either version Geneva was ahead of Zurich by about two decades in the formal organisation of an exchange, which reflects the older importance of its private banks and its links to the Paris market. The Geneva agents de change adopted the Parisian method of trading around a ring, the corbeille, a technique that would later be taken over in Zurich as well.

Notes

1. HLS, Bernard Degen, “Unternehmerverbände”, version of 24.03.2016, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/articles/016459/2016-03-24/. ↩
2. Swiss Finance Museum, “The history of trading”, https://www.finanzmuseum.ch/en/home/visit/guided-tours/history-of-trading.html. ↩
3. Schmid and Meier, Die Geschichte der Zürcher Börse, table of contents (chapters “Das Zürcher Börsenkomitee und der Börsenverein von 1855”, “Auf der Suche nach geeigneten Lokalitäten”, “Das stille Begräbnis der Sensalengesetzgebung”, “Die Entwicklung der Börse, des Börsenvereins und des Kursblattes bis 1870”), https://urn.ub.unibe.ch/urn:ch:slsp:zbz:991132393929705501:ihv:pdf. ↩
4. HLS, Degen, “Unternehmerverbände”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/articles/016459/2016-03-24/. The permanent secretariat of the association in Zurich received federal subsidies from 1882/1883, a model of cooperation between the state and private associations that was later extended to other bodies. ↩
5. “Zürcher Handelskammer”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrcher_Handelskammer. The centenary history of the exchange contains a chapter on “Die Gründung der Kaufmännischen Gesellschaft Zürich (Handelskammer) durch den Zürcher Börsenverein”. ↩
6. HLS, Robert Piller, “Handelskammern”, version of 24.03.2016, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D13808.php. ↩
7. “Schweizerische Nordostbahn”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizerische_Nordostbahn. ↩
8. HLS, Behrens, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D171.php. The HLS article dates Zurich’s emergence as a banking centre to the founding of the Kreditanstalt. ↩
9. HLS, Stefan Altorfer and Malik Mazbouri, “Kapitalmarkt”, version of 18.02.2010, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013913/2010-02-18/. The article adds that the rise of finance companies and the opening of the Swiss National Bank in 1907 promoted the integration of the Swiss capital market at national level. ↩
10. HLS, Elisabeth Meyerhans, “Börsen”, version of 19.08.2004, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D13741.php. ↩

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 September 2025.