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NatWest can trace its history back to the 1650s, when Thomas Smith started a cloth merchant’s business in Nottingham (the picture shows an early cloth stock ledger).
 
He began supplying credit to customers, and later the company evolved into a bank, one of the 200 local banks around England and Wales that through successive mergers became NatWest.

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Glyn, Mills, Hallifax, Glyn & Co, was an early influential backer of the St Katharine Dock project, handling the stock subscriptions for the company's initial capital of over £1.3m.

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Glyn, Mills & Co operated in a similar way to a merchant bank underwriting share and bond issues. Such issues, more common and complex from the mid-19th century, allowed thousands of smaller investments to be combined to fund major investment projects.

This loan certificate, for £27 2s, represents the investment by three London gentlemen to help the Canadian government fund railway building and other domestic infrastructure projects.

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A dinner in London in 1905 attended by 26 bankers, including Alexander Shand, of Alliance Bank, who worked together to raise an international loan for the Japanese government. Guest of honour was Korekiyo Takahashi, vice governor of Bank of Japan.

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During and after the First World War all the combatant nations relied heavily on loans for finance their war and later reconstruction efforts. London County & Westminster Bank (Paris) showed its commitment to the French nation by working hard to attract public subscriptions to the French government’s 5th national loan.

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NatWest is formed by the planned merger of three banks; National Provincial Bank, District Bank and Westminster Bank.

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NatWest Investment Bank is created to deliver the bank’s capital markets and securities activities.

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County NatWest, NatWest’s then investment banking subsidiary (later part of NatWest Markets) moves in to 135 Bishopsgate. The Bullring on the third floor was the largest dealing room in Europe at the time.

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NatWest Markets was formed in January, bringing together the bank’s corporate and institutional finance operations, treasury and capital markets activity and investment bank.

Its vision included the line, “we are driven to provide our wide ranging customer base with both traditional and innovative profit-effective solutions to their needs.”

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NatWest Markets introduced a corporate brand mark of its own, using the letters ‘NWM’ in a box. The business began to place major emphasis on the NatWest Group-wide vision of ‘Becoming First Choice’, with the success of NatWest Markets a key factor in achieving that vision.

New offices opened and existing offices (e.g. Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur) were transferred to NatWest Markets.

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NWM merged with the US-based merger and acquisitions firm Gleacher & Co, and opened new offices in Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan. Around 1,500 people joined the bank’s staff.

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In April NatWest Markets completed the acquisition of the investment management business, Gartmore, bringing its total funds under management to more than £55bn. The US-based investment bank Greenwich Capital Markets and private equity firm Hambro Magan were acquired in October.

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NatWest Markets was restructured, creating the NatWest Global Financial Markets division. GFM was designed to handle foreign exchange, money market services, currency derivatives and interest rate trading.

NatWest acquired Greenwich Capital Markets in 1996, a focused trading and capital markets business based in London, Greenwich Connecticut and Tokyo. Greenwich was run as a separate division until NatWest was acquired by RBS in 2000, when all investment banking activity was combined into a single entity.

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This booklet is the offer document issued by RBS to NatWest shareholders in December 1999, making the case for its proposed acquisition of their bank. The bid from RBS was accepted, and the acquisition was formally completed on 6 March 2000.

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Launch of the award-winning Agile Markets trading tool. It offered a scalable environment for electronic content from pre-trade, execution and post trade to reporting and market intelligence.

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Corporate & Institutional Banking became NatWest Markets in December and moves to 250 Bishopsgate.

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250 Bishopsgate is re-branded to NatWest.

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