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C. Hoare and Co., a British banking dynasty in business for more than 300 years
- ryanmercer 7y agoCan anyone comment with the family name, I'm being paywalled for being over my free views and not interested in paying 10$ for one article.
- phyalow 7y agoJust kill javascript on the domain, it will let you through every time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Hoare_%26_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Hoare_%26_Co
- aptwebapps 7y agoIt's C. Hoare & Co. and at least some of the family running it still have that name.
- DanBC 7y ago"C. Hoare & Co. has been in business for more than three hundred years, and the family that founded it is still running the show."
- Zenst 7y agoClick the web link and then cached version on google and life is good.
- gumby 7y agoJust delete the Bloomberg cookies and you reset your count.
- whycombagator 7y agohttp://archive.is/OLapf http://archive.is/OLapf
- zarathustraa 7y agoIt seems to me like there is a space to become the Gucci/Rolls Royce/Hermes/... of banking. The place where famous Instagrammers bank. Expensive, authentic, exclusive, heritage,
- chadash 7y agoThere are many existing banks that cater to rich people.
- zarathustraa 7y agoName one bank that the average person on the street recognizes as an exclusive bank that only rich people can afford to use, like they do with Ferarri or Rolls Royce.
- djpr 7y agoI worked with a start-up that focused on providing software for private family offices. These are for UHNW people who have more than 100 million USD. They do not want to brag that they go to the Bentley of banks. They want to keep it as private as possible. Typically UHNW has a private family office, something between a concierge and philanthropy and a private investment organization, which maintain relationships with private banking services provided by Credit Suisse, UBS, etc. It can cost 1-2 million USD a year to run a private family office. You never hear about family offices and in some areas you may only see a discreet sign at a posh building saying "private banking" and all of these folks want to keep it that way. The branding play here is being tight-lipped and discrete.
- zarathustraa 7y agoI'm well aware. The Bentley of banks is not for UHNW, just like mass luxury products are neither. The Bentley of banks is for people like this: https://twitter.com/FloydMayweather/status/1146911538227236864 https://twitter.com/FloydMayweather/status/11469115382272368...
- benj111 7y agoAs there are over 2000 Hoares (oo err) I'm guessing the dividend is kept low to keep the money with the 'core Hoares' who have the control?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kyrieeschaton 7y agoThe article keeps saying their advantage is their ability to "find solutions other banks can't". I don't know what that means. Exotic loan terms? Collateralizing difficult-to-value assets?
- inflatableDodo 7y agoFirstborn as collateral, probably. “They lend their own money and tend to be able to come up with solutions that other banks can’t.”, is also true about the Hells Angels.
- _wmd 7y agoI'd imagine for a client, most of the value of this bank is access to what I can only imagine to be the most fantastically exotic network it sits at the centre of
- walrus01 7y agoAs a person that is definitely not part of the global one percent, my imagination ran to something like the Eyes Wide Shut orgy scene. Fidelio.
- colechristensen 7y agoPerhaps without duties to investors or depositors they aren't hung up on rules and risk mitigations, specifically a banker being able to make decisions based only on their own judgement.
- throwaway981238 7y agoThey have depositors but you're right that they don't have investors, and decisions are made by people (i.e. the partners who own the bank) exercising their judgment instead of "Computer Says No!", like at most banks.
- nabla9 7y agoHoare is unilimited liability company. Partners are responsible with their personal assets. They are more risk averse than normal bank, they trade growth to stability.
- forkLding 7y agoNote that Child & Co is actually the oldest bank in Britain, not C.Hoare & Co. Child & Co. was sold which is likely why its no longer the original banking dynasty but it is still around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_%26_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_%26_Co.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> Note that Child & Co is actually the oldest bank in Britain, not C.Hoare & Co. The article is about the 'oldest banking dynasty', not the 'oldest bank', so you're not contradicting anything with your 'actually'.
- ascorbic 7y agoIt also refers to it as "the oldest surviving independent bank", which is also true.
- gumby 7y agoI wonder if legendary computer scientist Tony Hoare (C. A. R. Hoare) was part of the family, especially given his three given names.
- mjn 7y agoHe appears to be a distant relative, yes, but by my count, five generations removed from any direct connection to the banking business. Starting with his entry [1] on thepeerage.com, a UK genealogical site for the upper classes, you can backtrack to find that his great-great grandfather was a Charles James Hoare [2], who appears, if this Wikipedia entry is the same person [3], to have been a a Church of England clergyman and himself the son of a partner in the Hoare private bank. So, C.A.R. Hoare's great-great-great grandfather was part of the bank. The four generations in between seem to have been various kinds of upper-middle class government or quasi-government employees though: clergyman, clergyman, military officer, and colonial civil servant. Incidentally, I got the pointer to thepeerage.com from his biography in the book Reflections on the Work of C.A.R. Hoare, which calls his family background "somewhat upper-class" and references the site in a footnote. [1] http://thepeerage.com/p14062.htm#i140620 http://thepeerage.com/p14062.htm#i140620 [2] http://thepeerage.com/p39939.htm#i399386 http://thepeerage.com/p39939.htm#i399386 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hoare_(priest) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hoare_(priest)
- aw3c2 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare > He developed the sorting algorithm quicksort in 1959/1960. He also developed Hoare logic for verifying program correctness, and the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes (including the dining philosophers problem) and the inspiration for the occam programming language.
- asimjalis 7y agoAny relation to C A R Hoare who invented Quicksort?
- Theodores 7y agoI remember in my shop assistant days getting cheques from customers who banked with them. It felt like the punchline of an elaborate joke. At the time I was selling bikes. The kids from the council estate would have their parents or grandparents save up all year in a special book, paying by instalments. Then, at Christmas time, they would get a Raleigh bike, not quite the cheapest but certainly not the most expensive. It would be a nice new bike though. Meanwhile, we also had a trade in second hand bikes that customers would trade in. Out the back would be all kinds of rusting bicycles that had seen better days. Some customers would want these rather than the new shiny bikes. So you would go out the back and find something that would be suitable. Often a little bit of work would be needed to make these left-over has-been bicycles saleable. Then you would get further ground down on the price, adding on components from the workshop that happened to be there, e.g. a new seat or an OEM chain to replace the orange rusted one on the bike. The poor child that would have to ride the thing would be actually too small for it, the parents insisting on the bike the child could 'grow into'. The council estate kids would actually get the correct size for them, the parents would save up for a replacement over the coming year. But these kids buying second hand just had some ungainly monster sized bike that they had to 'grow into'. People of wealth don't actually show off their wealth if they are aristocratic. They still wear the same coat for decades so you can't guess that they are mansion-dwelling loaded or poor. The accent might give a clue but if you are customer service driven you just get on with it rather than make these discrimination thoughts. So, finally, having been haggled down to make the sale totally not worth it, there are one of two denouements. The more common one is to kindly offer to put the bike in the car for them to discover that it is a Range Rover (or posh Volvo). The other 'I have been had' denouement was for them to pay by cheque and for it to be a cheque from this very bank. (payment by cheque dates this story). Along with the 'drat, I have been had' sinking feeling there is also an unwritten understanding that you don't ask for the cheque guarantee card. Just ownership of the chequebook from the bank makes it good enough. By then you have clocked their scruffy attire is actually aristocratic posh or maybe even seen the Range Rover. The rich don't get rich by giving their money away. This lesson was drummed into me by these moments. I think that this bank must know this. Their customer is not going to be flipping houses and cars, forever speculating and living beyond their means. They pay for the upkeep to the estate, Tarquin's school fees and haggle for everything else. The next group of 'least profitable customer' for me happened to be Scottish. Inevitably if I had a customer with a Scottish accent I kind of knew my boss would be grilling me later for being tricked into a discount too far or a freebee too many. There would be a different denouement scenario with your typical Scottish customer. You would have everything agreed and then if some shop 50 miles away had allegedly offered them a price 1p cheaper than your best deal they would be fully willing to walk out on the sale, presumably off to get that 1p saving elsewhere. Luckily Scottish customers were few and far between, as were shoplifters, however, it was the C. Hoare cheque owners (and the other one, Coutts) that you had to watch out for.
- tro7ghor4 7y agoSo that front page article title mentioning "Rothschild" has been removed now?
- dang 7y agoYes, we replaced the baity title with the less baity subtitle. Standard moderation move here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20subtitle https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- lifeisstillgood 7y agoI think it was Mick Jagger who bought a London "residence" from this family in the '60s and enjoyed referring to it as "The Hoare House"
- JorgeGT 7y agoMy bankers are Hoares, one of the recurrent puns in Jack Aubrey novels.
- throwaway981238 7y agoI'm a customer of Hoare's. AMA.
- whitepoplar 7y agoWhat're some surprising facts about it that are unexpected to an outsider?
- throwaway981238 7y agoThere's a well in the cellar of their head office. The partners (who I kinda assumed would be silent) are actively involved in day-to-day decision-making about stuff like lending and new customer applications (I met with one of the partners when I applied for an account and he then had to get the agreement of his partners before they accepted me as a customer). Their online banking service is a lot slicker than I expected. While they obviously make an effort to preserve their offices in the traditional style you see in the photographs in the linked article, I get the impression that, behind the scenes, they employ totally up-to-date technology. They donate a significant chunk of the bank's profits to charity, through the Golden Bottle Trust - https://www.hoaresbank.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/The%20Golden%20Bottle%20Trust%20-%202017.pdf https://www.hoaresbank.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/The%... Their pens are really good.
- fredsted 7y agoWhat do they provide you that's worth the extra fees?
- throwaway981238 7y agoPeace of mind. I know that they're not going to kneejerk shut my account just because I received a bank transfer from a cryptocurrency exchange. I trust them more than I trust the regular high street banks to not try to screw me with hidden or unfair fees. If anything ever happens to me, I feel like they'll be helpful to my wife and family, whereas a regular bank would just shrug and say "Sorry, can't help!" By the way regarding the "extra fees", the standard account fee (£60 per month) is waived if you keep at least £25,000 in your account, and normal day-to-day online personal banking transactions are free so I don't actually pay any more fees than I would with a normal bank.
- epx 7y agoAnd Sir Tony Hoare invented the Quicksort!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thruflo22 7y agoFun fact, Edward Hoare, one of the owning family, is a mind mapping enthusiast who created the https://www.thortspace.com https://www.thortspace.com “collaborative visual thinking tool”.
- bediger4000 7y agoSo given the comparison to Rothschilds dynasty in the article, why isn't the Hoare family the target of numerous, vague conspiracy theories and Ben Garrison cartoons? Better PR agents? Luck?
- unexpected 7y ago1) They're old, but they're not that big - book value is "only" 370 million pounds. 2) They're not Jewish. A lot of the diatribes directed at the Rothschilds are anti-semitic in origin.
- frereubu 7y agoIf you're ever in the south west of England, you can visit Stourhead, their incredible country estate with huge landscaped gardens surrounding a lake, dotted with Palladian follies. It's now one of the flagship properties of the National Trust: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/stourhead https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/stourhead
- ascorbic 7y agoWhile the house and grounds are certainly the main attraction (and I'd highly recommend them), Stourhead has a good little museum about the Hoares too.
- markus_zhang 7y agoI'm wondering why do they decide to gain some publicity now.
- ggm 7y agoMy mother always said Sir Samuel Hoare (of the pre-WWII Hoare-Laval Crisis) was put into politics because he was too bloody stupid to be trusted to work in the family bank.