Looking at HSBC, from its inception, it was a public bank.
The initiator of HSBC, Su Shilan, was just a supervisor at the Great Britain Steamship Company at the time. After coming up with the idea of founding HSBC, Su Shilan wrote to the then British Colonial Secretary, stating that the creation of HSBC was to "meet an absolute need, due to the inability of branches (of banks based in the United Kingdom or India) in the East to meet various trade needs locally, including the business between Hong Kong and the East, and trading ports in Japan, which now have a very extensive nature, requiring more specialized methods than any bank agency can handle."
Su Shilan's letter received the Colonial Secretary's approval.
However, Su Shilan evidently did not have the ability to establish such a complex bank, and he also needed the support of major firms in Hong Kong for HSBC to become the bank he talked about.
