The Chinese Banks: From the First Straits Chinese Banks to OCBC

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For most of the nineteenth century the Chinese merchants of Singapore had no bank of their own. They traded on credit extended by European agency houses, borrowed from the exchange banks through compradors and from Chettiar moneylenders. Their savings went home to China through remittance firms. In the first three decades of the twentieth century this changed. Chinese merchants founded a series of deposit banks, incorporated under colonial company law, managed partly on Western lines and owned and patronised largely by members of a single dialect group. Within thirty years the most important of them had merged into the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, which remains one of the three Singapore banks that dominate the domestic market today.

This chapter traces that development. It begins with the first Chinese banks and with the failure of the earliest of them, the Kwong Yik Bank, whose collapse in 1913 prompted the first colonial rules on bank governance. It then examines the division of Chinese banking along Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese lines and follows the Hokkien banks through the boom and slump of the rubber economy to the merger of 1932. Two further sections consider the ties between the Chinese banks and China and the role of the banks as community institutions. The chapter closes with the lessons the story holds for bankers and advisers today and with a comparison with Geneva.

The comparison is instructive because both financial centres passed through the same world crisis at the same time. In Genève, place financière internationale, the Geneva volume of this series, Part D describes how the crisis of 1931 brought down the Banque de Genève, led to the collapse of the Banque d’Escompte Suisse in 1934 and produced the federal Banking Act of the same year. Singapore’s Chinese banks met the slump with a private merger, negotiated among community leaders without a central bank, a deposit guarantee or a banking statute. The two responses tell much about the institutional character of each place. Their differences still shape the regulatory cultures examined in Part E.

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 October 2026.