Raiffeisen (Switzerland) headquarters location St. Gallen
Union organisation
The 246 legally independent Raiffeisen banks in Switzerland joined to form Raiffeisen Switzerland (formerly called the Swiss Union of Raiffeisen Banks). Like the participating Raiffeisen banks, Raiffeisen Switzerland is a cooperative. It coordinates the group's activities, creates the basic conditions for the business activity of the local Raiffeisen banks (such as IT, infrastructure and refinancing), and advises and supports them in all commercial matters. Furthermore, risk management and auditing also come under the remit of Raiffeisen Switzerland. Raiffeisen Switzerland runs directly managed branches in the urban regions of Basel, Bern, St. Gallen, Thalwil, Winterthur and Zurich, whereby these are not independent cooperatives. Raiffeisen Switzerland's headquarters have been unofficially located in St. Gallen since 1912, and were made the legal headquarters in 1936.History
The first cooperative banks were founded in Germany during the 1840s until the 1870s, upon the ideas and the initiative of Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch and Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, where farmers founded their own credit banks to finance seeds, machinery and wares. The idea of cooperative banks caught on in Europe, particularly in rural areas. The first Raiffeisen bank in Switzerland was founded on the initiative of parish priest Johann Traber in 1899, located in Bichelsee. In 1902, ten institutions founded the Swiss Raiffeisen union. From 1912 onwards, the union ran a collective office in St. Gallen, and this was expanded over the following 40 years by its director Josef Stadelmann.
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