The creation of a development bank by the BRICS goes back to a proposal made by economists Joseph Stiglitz, Nicholas Stern, Amar Bhattacharya, and Mattia Romani to the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Indian government officials with whom they had developed close relations. The idea of a new bank was well received when the Indian government brought it to the other BRICS, with the exception of Russia, as noted above. Despite Russia, an understanding was reached. At the level of the Leaders’ Summit, in New Delhi, on March 2012, it was Putin who came into play and the Indian proposal was adopted with the inclusion in the Leaders’ communiqué of the following crucial sentences that indicated not an agreement to create, or even to start negotiations, but to look into the issue:

I draw the reader's attention to one specific point that would become a controversial one later on: the idea from the very beginning was not to create a bank exclusively for the BRICS but one dedicated to supporting development also in other EMDCs beyond BRICS. After the bank was created, as we will later see, Russian officials would argue repeatedly that the bank had to focus on the BRICS themselves and acted so as to keep it closed to new members in the initial five years of its existence.

A working group was created, cochaired by India and South Africa. One year later, the decision was taken, in the Durban Summit, to start formal negotiations, and the working group was then transformed into a negotiating group. However, the process started off rather poorly. Participants got lost initially in discussing more or less academic papers and notes, not always of high quality, about development banks and related topics.