The Hoare family coat of arms, a double-headed eagle.
Photographer: Bryn Colton/BloombergThe British Banking Dynasty That’s Even Older Than the Rothschilds
C. Hoare & Co. has been in business for more than three hundred years, and the family that founded it is still running the show.
In the U.K. there’s old money, really old money and then there’s C. Hoare & Co.
The London firm was started in 1672 by Richard Hoare and has tended to the affairs of diarist Samuel Pepys, poet Lord Byron and novelist Jane Austen. That’s almost a hundred years older than the famous Rothschild dynasty, which was founded in the 1760s. After more than three centuries of continuous operation, the family still runs the show, overseeing about 4.4 billion pounds ($5.6 billion) of deposits and sticking to a traditional way of doing business.