London’s Billionaires-Only Bank Chauffeurs Customers To and From Vault in $300K Rolls-Royce
Members also have access to the bank’s exclusive in-house supercar club.
When you walk into a bank, you might notice signage informing you of the facility's membership with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), guaranteeing up to $100,000 of your funds are insured in case of a bank's failure. This might be fine for the ordinary Joe with a rainy day fund sitting in their savings account, but what about those who have considerably more?
The ultra-wealthy often use their money to churn out more cash through investing and other means of passive revenue generation, and with signs of a potential economic recession appearing on the horizon, many who fall under the categorization of ultra-high net worth (UHNW) are liquidating their assets and investing into safer long-term cold storage for cash, jewels, and precious metals. That's where a company called International Bank Vaults comes into play.
IBV's newest location will be housed in a London mansion-turned-vault located on a street known for its wealth—Park Lane. Inside the vault are the most expensive safety deposit boxes that the city has ever seen. A tiny box measuring 2 inches high, 6 inches wide, and 19 inches deep has an annual rental fee of $776 (more than twice that of London's most popular savings institution, Metro Bank) while entire rooms of storage can be had for upwards of $3.2 million.
Of course, the average person won't be able to just walk in and buy a box for status purposes. In fact, less than 2,300 people in the entire world will be able to escrow their holdings at IBV's new location.
"We won't deal with millionaires," Sean Hoey, the vault's managing director, told The Guardian. "We will be dealing only with billionaires."
Because the client list is so slim, IBV is breaking out all of the luxury amenities for its potential customers, including a service that entails chauffeuring them to and from the vault in a Rolls-Royce said to be owned by the bank's founder.
Ashok Sewnarain, the man who opened the first IBV-owned vault in 2005, is a South African multimillionaire. He's quite active on social media and often posts photos of exotic cars in roped-off parking spaces. It comes as no surprise that he owns a collection of swanky automobiles.
But it turns out that Sewnarain doesn't just love cars—he's made them an integral part of his business. IBV offers complimentary access to its own supercar club for bank members and promotes it on IBV's official Instagram account. Potential clients might find themselves swooned by the photos of a Lamborghini Aventador SV, Ferrari 812 Superfast N-Largo, and Bentley Mulsanne parked outside of other IBV locations, dreaming that they'll one day appear on the club's YouTube channel.
If you so happen to be looking for a new place to store your belongings and also are the caliber of clientele that IBV is seeking, you can apply to open an account with the organization. After a vetting process to determine if one is worthy, IBV will either approve or deny the application before ushering out the company car. For the rest of us, there's always Turo.
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