A number of German banks, meanwhile, were pushing their financial operations in the Near East. The success of the _Deutsche Palästina Bank_[17] encouraged the formation of other similar institutions. The _Nationalbank für Deutschland_, in 1904, founded the _Banque d’Orient_, with offices in Hamburg, Athens, Constantinople, Salonica, and Smyrna. The following year the _Dresdner Bank_, in coöperation with other large Austro-German financial institutions, inaugurated the important _Deutsche Orientbank_, with a capital stock of sixteen million marks. This latter bank took over the Hamburg and Constantinople offices of the _Banque d’Orient_ and established a large number of branches of its own, including those at Alexandria, Cairo, and Smyrna. The _Deutsche Orientbank_ became an active promoter of industrial enterprises in Asiatic Turkey; for example, in 1908 it organized _La Société pour Enterprises Electriques en Orient_, a company which proceeded to take over the surface railways as well as the electric light and power concession of Constantinople. In 1908 the _Deutsche Bank_ itself formally opened an office in Constantinople for the transaction of a general banking business.[18] The entry of these German banks into the Near Eastern field was of no small importance to the British and French financial institutions already there. The German bankers allowed liberal rates of interest on time and check deposits and permitted reasonable overdrafts at low rates. These practices were in sharp contrast with the rigid regulations of the older-established banks. The _Deutsche Bank_ undertook to collect claims of local merchants against the Turkish Government; through its influence in the Government departments it cut red tape and secured payments which otherwise might have been delayed for years. Constantinople business men welcomed their emancipation from the ultra-conservative methods of the older institutions, and it was not long before a very thriving business was being transacted by the German banks and their agencies in the Near East.[19] Here was a high-powered bomb to disturb the quiet which heretofore had ruled in the banking community of Constantinople and of Asiatic Turkey. Germans were disturbing the financial, as well as the commercial and industrial, _status quo_ in the Near East!