The Société générale de crédit industriel et commercial was founded on 7 May 1859, mainly on the initiative of banker Armand Donon who was supported by the politically influential Duke of Morny, as a competitor to the Pereire brothers's Crédit Mobilier on the model of successful British depository banks such as the London and Westminster Bank.

The CIC soon opened a number of other branches in Paris,[2]: 26  and in the 1860s actively developed its international lending, not least in the newly formed Kingdom of Italy where it sponsored one of the early joint-stock banks, the Banca di Credito Italiano.

1864) which created networks of their own provincial branches, the CIC sponsored a number of affiliated but autonomous regional banks.

[2]: 53 In Paris, in its first few decades the CIC's network of branches lagged well behind those of its two main rivals, Crédit Lyonnais and Société Générale.

[2]: 50–51 In November 1889, the bank's head office was relocated to a new building on 66, rue de la Victoire, where it would remain for over a century.

1913),[4]: 61  and in November 1919 created a majority-owned subsidiary, the Société alsacienne de crédit industriel et commercial, whose head office was relocated to Strasbourg in March 1922.

[2]: 78  In 1929, the CIC created a central body for its regional banks, the Union de banques régionales pour le crédit industriel.

In reaction to the Suez Company's purchase of a 20% equity stake in the Banque de l'Union parisienne (BUP) in February 1965, CIC chairman Edmond Lebée reached out to Suez's rival the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (also known as Paribas) to explore a possible merger, whose project leaked in the press on 5 June 1966.

In the summer of 1968, the situation escalated into a takeover battle on the Paris stock exchange, following which neither Paribas nor Suez succeeded in acquiring a majority of the CIC's shares.

[2]: 116  Eventually, on 10 September 1971, the two bidders reached an agreement under which Suez would take control of the CIC, while ceding the BUP to Paribas.

[2]: 120 In 1982, the CIC was nationalized under François Mitterrand's Socialist presidency, together with most of the affiliated regional banks and with its parent, the Suez Company.

The BUE had been born in 1968 from a restructuring of the Union européenne, industrielle et financière (UEIF), created in 1920 by Eugène Schneider II together with the Banque de l'Union Parisienne and the Empain group in relation with their business interests in the Little Entente countries, especially Czechoslovakia.

Both the BUE and CIC-Paris became fully-owned subsidiaries of a parent holding company, the Compagnie financière de CIC, which also held the stakes in the regional banks outside Paris.

Then, in 1985 the government encouraged the insurer Groupe des Assurances Nationales [fr] (GAN) to build up a stake in CIC, which reached 34% in January 1986.

Following the election of a center-right government in 1993, the political pendulum shifted back towards privatization of the CIC and its parent the GAN insurance company, but this was made difficult by both entities' financial difficulties through the downturn of the early 1990s.

[2]: 153–155 In 1998, a second attempt under a new center-left government was more successful and the competitive tender was won in mid-April, somewhat unexpectedly, by the Banque Fédérative du Crédit Mutuel, a Strasbourg-based entity of the Crédit Mutuel Group, led by Michel Lucas [fr], with a bid for a 67% stake that valued the whole of UE-CIC at 20 billion French francs.

[2]: 158–166 The new management from Crédit Mutuel further central control over the group's regional banks, and in 1999 the UE-CIC and CIC-Paris merged back into a single entity called CIC.

In 2022, CIC encountered international controversy when a New York Times article highlighted its siphoning of millions of Francs in fees and interest from Haiti’s treasury in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

[6] As of 2011, the company offers savings accounts, mortgages, and loans; it also owns stakes in specialized entities involved in private banking, asset management, leasing, securities brokerage, and property/casualty insurance.

Currency manipulation was observed because the Haitian Government asked the National Bank to print money to cover the deficits of the payments made to institutions like the CIC.

dollars from Haiti’s national bank — about an entire year’s worth of the country’s tax revenues at the time, the documents show.