In late October 2023 more than 40 of Europe’s most powerful bankers convened at the palatial Dolder Grand hotel overlooking Zurich for three days of discussions about the state of their industry. Attendees were given the chance to quiz Switzerland’s finance minister Karin Keller-Sutter and central bank governor Thomas Jordan, just over six months after the pair played key roles in the rescue of Credit Suisse by its rival UBS. The talks, which were not publicly disclosed, were
arranged by a highly influential organisation whose existence is barely
known outside its rarefied membership.
Italian President Francesco Cossiga at the 77th session of the IIEB on October 20, 1989.
» This is not like Davos, where anyone can buy their way in. This really is exclusive. «
[...] The Institut International d’Etudes Bancaires (IIEB, International Banking Study Institute) is the most exclusive and secretive networking club in European finance, where bank bosses rub shoulders with guests from presidents and prime ministers to royalty and central bankers. “This is not like Davos, where anyone can buy their way in,” one longtime member told the Financial Times. “This really is exclusive.” For 73 years the IIEB has brought together the heads of Europe’s biggest banks twice a year at luxury hotels and royal palaces across the continent to discuss sensitive subjects such as M&A deals and global policymaking. The group has no website and its membership, meeting agendas and minutes are not made public. Members are discouraged from sharing details of the discussions.
[...] The IIEB was founded in Paris in 1950 by the heads of four lenders from across the continent — Crédit Industriel et Commercial, Union Bank of Switzerland, Société Générale de Belgique and Amsterdamsche Bank — with the aim of holding regular top-level discussions on developments in the banking sector, as well as the economy and monetary system. It was part of a raft of cross-border institutions set up during that period to encourage closer ties between organisations from countries that had recently been at war with one another. [...] High-profile guests are a staple of IIEB gatherings. In 2000 and again in 2009, the group was hosted by Prince Andrew, first at St James’s Palace and then Buckingham Palace. At the IIEB’s first meeting in Russia, in St Petersburg in 2013, it received a speech from former president Dmitry Medvedev, while the club welcomed Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, now Turkey’s president, at a gathering in Istanbul when he was still the country’s prime minister.
[...] In one of the few publicly disclosed speeches given to the IIEB, European Central Bank vice-president Lucas Papademos began addressing the October 2006 IIEB meeting in Athens by quoting Adam Smith’s warning against collusion from 'The Wealth of Nations': “People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but on those occasions when they meet the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices. If Adam Smith could have seen this gathering of top bankers from across Europe, would he have expressed such an opinion, which would also be a cause of alarm for a central banker because of the potential ‘contrivance to raise prices’? I very much doubt it.”