Banco de Chile History Book

Dear friends:

With great pleasure I share with you the history of Banco de Chile, a journey of more than 100 years, which began in 1893 with the fusion of Banco de Valparaiso, Chile National Bank and Agricultural Bank. Since then the Bank of Chile has been part of the history of our country, helping to build the foundations of a responsible Chile with deep enterprising spirit that has known look opportunely to the world, building the foundations for a solid economic model, reliable and stable.

Walk through the story of Banco de Chile is also walk through the history of our country. Thus, in these pages the historian Patricia Arancibia Clavel tells us several important historical events that marked Chile and the world, and the great challenges that our bank and the banking industry in general had to face and overcome in more than a century of history.

This book is an invitation to relive the past, valuing the facts in the history, to understand in depth what really the Banco de Chile is about, its tradition of prestige and special way of doing things. Our present, what we are today and the leader position we have in the national financial system is largely the result of what people did before us. Men like Jose Besa, Augusto Villanueva, Pedro Torres, Manuel Vinagre, Adolfo Rojas and many other men and women who gave with dedication part of their lives to build what is now the Bank of Chile. This book is a tribute to them.

Having the name of our country in our brand is not only an honor but also a great responsibility. Those who About a century ago gave life to the Banco de Chile, identifying their desires with those of the nation, they are not wrong. Its shareholders, customers, officers and employees, can say with pride that they are heritors of an institution that, as witness these pages, has played a role of such a big importance in the country's development and progress of its inhabitants. Its biography is, in fact, closely related to the history of our country, being company in times of crisis and prosperity , apparently immutable, but without being immutable at all.

It is its style, its way of doing things, its way of life and tradition, which distinguishes it. And this stamp is the best guarantee of the future that awaits at the forefront, always evolving but fortunately without being what it´s always have been El Banco de Chile, the heritage of all Chileans.

Pablo Granifo Lavín
President of Banco de Chile