[4] Crédit Lyonnais then started its operations on July 26, initially in the recently opened Palais du Commerce of Lyon.

During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, he moved some of the bank's funds to London for safety and thus created Crédit Lyonnais's first foreign branch there.

The first phase of that Parisian Crédit Lyonnais headquarters was completed in 1883, but it kept expanding until occupying the entire city block in 1913 after Germain's death.

Beyond the prestige head office, in the late 1870s the Crédit Lyonnais aggressively developed its network of Parisian locations, opening 23 in 1879 alone.

[4] After London in 1870, Crédit Lyonnais soon embarked in an ambitious drive of international expansion, opening branches in Alexandria (1874),[5] Constantinople[6] and Cairo (1875),[5] Geneva,[7] Madrid[8] and Port Said (1876),[5] Vienna (1877), Saint Petersburg (1878, initially under an individual name due to restrictive regulations that were lifted the next year),[9] New York City (1879, but closed in 1882 after facing punitive taxation), Barcelona,[8] Brussels,[10] and Smyrna (1888),[6] Moscow (1891),[9] Jerusalem[6] and Odesa (1892),[9] Lisbon (1893), Bombay and Calcutta (1895, closed the next year),[11] Porto and Valencia (1897), Seville and San Sebastián (1900).

[11] Overall, Crédit Lyonnais became a major player in the placement of foreign government bonds, not least of the Russian Empire, thus participating in directing the large savings of French households to destinations abroad, which resulted in the then widespread perception of France as the "banker of the world".

Crédit Lyonnais's franchise was negatively impacted by Russia's repeal of its debt obligations following the October Revolution of 1917, and was otherwise disrupted by World War I.

Then under Jean-Yves Haberer [fr], appointed chairman in 1988, the bank embarked on a highly aggressive expansion strategy both domestically and internationally, including by providing favorable terms of financing to politically connected projects, companies and entrepreneurs.

In 1989 it created Crédit Lyonnais Europe, a wholly owned subsidiary that was intended to embody its leading position in what was expected to be a forthcoming European banking market consolidation.

In April 1995, the government formed a "bad bank", the Consortium de réalisation [fr], to which it transferred the Crédit Lyonnais's non-core assets.

[23] To cap the sequence of misfortune, the Crédit Lyonnais's storied Parisian headquarters was partly destroyed by fire on 5 May 1996.

Also in 2010, the bank's staff eventually moved out of the historic headquarters on the boulevard des Italiens, relocating to the Parisian suburb of Villejuif.