The NIEM was founded in 1857 by Paulus Tiedeman Jr. and , initially as a subsidiary of their Tiedeman & van Kerchem partnership. It was only the second private financial institution (after the
Bank of Java, established in 1828) from which merchants and traders in the
Dutch East Indies could receive credit, as the
Netherlands Trading Society had not yet become a bank by then. It engaged into no activities other than commercial banking, providing credit to trade and industry, and unlike other local players, did not extend long-term agricultural loans. For that reason, the agricultural crisis of 1884 hardly affected the NIEM.The NIEM remained small until 1888, then started to grow rapidly. In late 1901, the NIEM's shareholders decided to move away from the original partnership model. Jan Dinger left the partnership, in which he had joined Tiedeman and van Kerchem, and formed the NIEM's first management board together with Ede Abraham Zeilinga. Since 1922 the head office in Batavia had been located in a building designed by L.M. van den Berg & W.H. Pichel. The NIEM had offices - with date and architect as far as is known- in, among others;
Bandung (1912, P.A.J. Moojen),
Batavia (1913, P.A.J. Moojen),
Banjarmasin (1930, Fermont-Cuypers),
Bogor (1932, J.J. Jiskoot)),
Cirebon,
Yogyakarta,
Makassar,
Magelang (1929,-),
Malang (1929,-),
Medan (1928, Fermont-Cuypers)
Manado,
Padang (1930, Fermont-Cuypers),
Palembang (1938, Fermont-Cuypers),
Purwokerto (1938, M.J.J. Vernac),
Semarang (1913, P.A.J. Moojen),
Sibolga (1939, J. Bennink),
Surabaya(1913, P.A.J. Moojen) en
Weltevreden, now
Sawah Besar,
Central Jakarta (1924, Fermont-Cuypers). It also opened branches in
Amsterdam in 1910, at 575
Keizersgracht (which it kept until 1960), and in
The Hague. In 1912 the NIEM created a securities affiliate, the , which it fully took over in 1921. The bank was severely affected by the financial crisis in 1931. Under the
Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies during
World War II, the occupation authorities first closed all Dutch and other Western banks in March 1942, starting with the
Bank of Java, and sequestered them to seize as much as possible of their assets. Among the three largest commercial banks, the Japanese authorities determined that the
Netherlands Trading Society had assets of more than 280 million
Dutch guilders, the
Nederlandsch-Indische Handelsbank had 158 million, and the NIEM had 99 million. Of these, the Japanese occupiers were able to seize 27 million guilders in total. The banks could only reopen after the
surrender of Japan in the late summer of 1945. ==Indonesian independence and aftermath==