The bank
A small bank, deliberately.
AB Cesis Bankas has looked after a limited number of families and institutions for 28 years. We have grown slowly and on purpose: the constraint is not capital, it is how many relationships can be held properly at once.
How we work
Four principles we are willing to be held to.
We say no more often than yes
We take on a small number of new relationships each year. A bank that accepts everyone cannot give anyone the attention it promised them.
The person who answers knows your file
No queue, no menu, no reading your details out to a stranger. Your banker holds your file and has the authority to act on it.
Written mandates, not implied ones
What we may do and may not do is set down in a document you keep. Nothing is authorised by a term you accepted once, years ago.
Plain figures
One fee schedule. No spread we do not disclose, no rebate we keep. If a product only works because you cannot see inside it, we do not offer it.
Governance
Who is accountable, and to whom.
- Ownership
- Privately held by the founding families and the partnership
- Board
- Seven members, four independent
- Risk committee
- Meets monthly; chaired by an independent director
- Audit
- External audit annually; internal audit reports to the board
- Capital
- CET1 21.4% — materially above requirement
History
Founded 1998.
The bank was established to do one thing: hold and administer capital for families who intended to keep it across generations. That has not changed, though almost everything about how it is done has.
We added discretionary portfolio management when clients began asking us to make decisions rather than merely execute them, and an institutional desk when the foundations those families created grew large enough to need one. Everyday banking came last, because for a long time we assumed somebody else would do it well enough. They did not, so we do it ourselves.
What we have never done is proprietary trading, lending against assets we cannot value, or distributing a product because it paid us more than the alternative.
Talk to us before you decide anything.
An introduction costs nothing and commits you to nothing.