The State Bank of India, the
largest banking and financial services company
in India by revenue, assets and market
capitalization: traces its ancestry to British India,
through the Imperial Bank of India, to the
founding in 1806 of the Bank of Calcutta,
making it the oldest commercial bank in the
Indian Subcontinent. Bank of Madras merged
into the other two presidency banks—Bank of
Calcutta and Bank of Bombay—to form the
Imperial Bank of India, which in turn became the
State Bank of India. The Government of India
nationalized the Imperial Bank of India in 1955,
with the Reserve Bank of India taking a 60%
stake, and renamed it the State Bank of India