C. Hoare & Co., the UK’s oldest privately-owned bank, has announced the appointment of 10th generation family member Abigail Malortie as its newest partner.
Malortie joined C. Hoare & Co. in December 2020 and has held a number of roles within the product, trusts & estates, risk, finance and treasury teams. She becomes the 51st partner in the private bank’s history – and the fourth woman.
[See also: How C. Hoare & Co. became the oldest family-owned bank in the world]
A Cambridge University graduate, Malortie qualified as a solicitor before moving into the charity sector, where she worked as a community organiser and co-founded educational charity Centre for London. She went on to work as a strategy adviser in the Department for Education and later as a strategy consultant at EY-Parthenon.
In a statement, the bank said Malortie had been ‘instrumental’ in ‘embedding the bank’s purpose – to be “good bankers and good citizens” – within the business’ and led the firm’s B-Corp certification.
C. Hoare & Co. was founded in 1672 by the goldsmith Richard Hoare and moved to its current home on Fleet Street in 1690. Some 351 years later, the bank is still doing business under the famous sign of the golden bottle and remains under the watchful eye of Sir Richard’s descendants.
[See also: The UK’s best private banks: the exclusive institutions UHNWs trust with their money]
Content from our partners
Partners are all selected from the pool of roughly 2,500 Hoare cousins. Six of the eight current partners are 11th generation descendants of the founder. The seventh partner, appointed in November 2021, was the first of the 12th generation to be recruited: Amy Rodwell. Rodwell, an Arabic graduate from Leeds University, was also the first non-Hoare-surnamed family member to be a partner. She is now followed by Abigail Malortie.
Speaking to Spear’s contributing editor Alec Marsh for a feature marking the bank’s 250th anniversary, partner and director Alexander Hoare explained that finding the brightest and best family members has been part of the C. Hoare & Co. formula from the beginning.
‘You don’t want people who’ll just treat it as a nice sinecure,’ he said. ‘You want people who’ll own it. I am looking for people that are quite capable enough to have good careers anywhere, not people who have got the right gene pool.’
