The French bank that fired the first warning shot of the 2008 crisis
On 9 August 2007, BNP Paribas closed two investment funds exposed to American subprime mortgages, becoming the first major financial group to admit the damage publicly. That day is now widely treated as the start of the 2008 financial crisis, and moving early helped the bank avoid the heavy losses that battered rivals such as UBS.
The bank itself was born from a stock market brawl. In 1999 Societe Generale bid for Paribas while BNP bid for Societe Generale and counter-bid for Paribas. BNP's attempt on Societe Generale failed, but its Paribas offer succeeded, and the two merged on 23 May 2000. Its logo, the courbe d'envol or curve of taking flight, shows stars turning into birds above a green square meant to suggest nature and optimism.
The crisis became a shopping opportunity. On 6 October 2008 BNP Paribas agreed to take over 75 percent of the failing Fortis bank's Belgian business and 66 percent in Luxembourg, paying partly by making the Belgian state a major shareholder. Fortis shareholders voted against the deal, and a court briefly suspended it, yet the acquisition went through and the unit became BNP Paribas Fortis. That is why a French bank still counts the Belgian government among its owners, holding 5.3 percent in mid-2023. Taking control of Luxembourg's BGL in 2009 made BNP Paribas the eurozone's largest bank by deposits.
Growth continued by acquisition. It had already bought Italy's Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, then the country's sixth-largest bank, in 2006, and in 2014 it completed the purchase of Poland's BGZ Bank for a reported $1.3 billion. It went the other way in the United States, announcing in December 2021 a $16.3 billion deal handing its Californian subsidiary, Bank of the West, to BMO and quitting American retail banking.
Today it employs about 190,000 people across three main divisions, and it is regarded as systemically important, supervised directly by the European Central Bank since late 2014. In 2022 it reported revenues of 50.4 billion euros, up 9 percent, with most banking income earned in Europe. An April 2026 S&P Global ranking put it at the top of Europe's banks by assets, at $3.279 trillion.
Source: BNP Paribas
