A hundred and fifty years read through the documents that survived them — share warrants, survey plans, a letter of 26 October 1912.
Franz Philippson had come to Brussels from Magdeburg in 1865 as a clerk in the Errera banking house. Six years later, barely twenty, he opened his own. He would direct it for more than fifty years, until his death — the beginning of a line that has now run through six generations.
He founded the Compagnie Générale de Chemins de Fer Secondaires — today CFE — and with it took the house into railways, zinc and telegraphy, from Congo to Brazil, Argentina and Canada. Infrastructure, for him, was never only an asset class: it was the thing that let people and goods move at all.
From 1896 he represented the Brussels community on the administrative council of the Jewish Colonization Association. He became its vice-president in 1901 and its president in 1919 — three decades in which the bank's balance sheet and the family's obligations were never kept in separate rooms.
The ICA's first organised Jewish settlement in Brazil was surveyed in the region of Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul: 4,472 hectares for thirty-seven families — some two hundred and sixty-seven people from Bessarabia. Each household received land, a house, tools, oxen, cows, a wagon and a horse. The colony was named Philippson, after the man then chairing the association.
Compagnie de Chemins de Fer au Brésil: incorporated in Portland, Maine, on 9 November 1906, with administrative seats in London, Paris and São Paulo and an authorised capital of fifty million dollars. The bearer shares — engraved by Waterlow & Sons of London Wall, a locomotive crossing a trestle bridge above the title — are among the most striking documents in the family's archive.
A hand-written letter to F. Philippson, folded twice, still legible after a century. Its writer is in town for an international conference, has secured an invitation for the Ezra society of Antwerp, mentions that Mr Montefiore will arrive tomorrow, and asks — courteously, at length — whether he might call. Business, community and manners, in a single page.
Printed in Paris by Imprimerie Chaix, the company's own system map runs from Porto Velho to Montevideo. Its legend distinguishes lines in operation from lines to be built, and — tellingly — shades the land itself by purpose: colonisation, lumber, cattle, rubber. Santa Maria sits on it, a few centimetres from the Philippson colony.
Franz died in 1929, president of the ICA. Jules — who had joined the bank in 1904 — succeeded him. In 1934–35 he took a decisive part in reforming the Belgian banking system, and left a mark on Belgian finance across a career of fifty-seven years.
Alain Philippson, fourth generation, joined Banque Degroof in 1972 and as managing partner played a central role in the management buy-out that brought the family back onto the share register. He chaired the bank from 2002 to 2018.
The sale of Degroof Petercam closed a hundred and fifty years of banking. Four thousand miles away, at Itaara in Rio Grande do Sul, the 1904 monument and cemetery of the Philippson colony — listed as a national historic site in 1994 — are still there, with the name cut into the stone.
PIC1871 is not a successor to the bank; it is what the family did next. The mandate is unchanged in substance — patient capital, held across generations rather than quarters, and obligations that do not end at the balance sheet.