The people who answer are the people who decide.
Ingot Private has one desk and a short list of names behind it. The banker who takes your call can price the credit, move the money, and say no without asking permission. Nothing here is run by a committee you will never meet, and no relationship is owned by a department. The house is small on purpose, so the people in it can be known.
A bank is a promise, and a promise is only as good as the person willing to sign it.
Every relationship at Ingot is owned by a named officer who stays with it for the life of the account. We have never sold a client to another firm, never routed a decision through a call center, and never asked a client to explain themselves to a stranger. Continuity is not a perk here. It is the whole of the service.
Six people you can name.
There is no floor of relationship managers and no rotating roster. The bank is run by six officers, each of whom carries a decision and answers for it later.
Margaret Vane
Joined the house in 1998, took the desk in 2016, and still keeps a client book of her own.
Harlan Roe
Prices every line the bank writes and holds the pen on the ones the desk would rather not.
Cecilia Thorne
Runs discretionary and advisory mandates on the principle that the client keeps the last word.
Douglas Ferrers
Keeps the balance sheet conservative enough to be boring in every year that matters.
Adaeze Okonkwo
Reads every document as if it will be examined in twenty years, because some of them are.
Whitfield Mercer
Weighs, assays and vaults the metal in Greenwich — the business the bank was chartered to do.
Three questions, answered plainly.
One officer, one signature, no committee.
Credit, custody and mandates are each owned by a single officer who carries the decision and answers for it later. A file moves in days because it does not wait in a queue for a meeting. When the desk cannot serve a request properly, it says so before the paperwork begins.
- Every line is written against our own balance sheet and held there.
- The banker who takes the call can price the credit and move the money.
- A decision is made by a name, not routed to a department.
- Typical first credit draw
- 6 days
- Committees between you and a yes
- None
We are paid to keep money, not to move it.
The house earns a spread on deposits it lends conservatively and a flat fee on the assets it stewards. There are no product commissions, no proprietary funds to place, and no incentive to trade an account that is better left alone. What is good for the client and what is good for the bank tend to be the same sentence.
- No commissions on transactions, wires, or trades.
- No proprietary products the desk is rewarded for selling.
- A single stated fee, printed on the statement it applies to.
- Wire fees, in or out
- $0
- Proprietary funds sold
- None
The relationships we decline are the product.
Most requests to open a relationship are turned down, and many requests from existing clients are talked out of before they cost anyone. Saying no is not a courtesy the desk extends; it is the discipline that has cleared every panic since 1807. A bank that cannot decline has already agreed to everything.
- A relationship we cannot serve properly is one we do not open.
- Advances are sized to what we would be content to hold, not to what a client will accept.
- We would rather lose the fee than the client's next ten years.
- Minimum relationship
- $10M
- Panics cleared since 1807
- Every one
What clients say
The first thing they did was talk me out of the loan. I have been a client ever since.
One officer has known our family for twenty years. She has never once tried to sell us anything.
You are introduced to a person, not a portal.
Write to the desk, or ask the client who sent you here to make the call.