A continuity institution

The principles set out in this paper are not abstract for Bordier & Cie. The firm has practised them on its own house for almost two centuries, and the way it is owned, governed and run is itself an extended illustration of the Continuity Compact.

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From 1844 to the fifth generation

The house traces its origins to 1844, when Jaques Reverdin opened a stockbroking firm in Geneva. The business that grew from it helped seed what became the city’s stock exchange; Reverdin was a driving force behind the Société des Agents de Change, founded in 1850, and compiled Geneva’s first regular exchange price-list. His son-in-law, Ami Bordier, joined the house in 1871 and became a partner in 1888. On Reverdin’s death in 1895 the partnership was renamed Bordier & Cie, with Ami Bordier as its sole managing partner, bearing unlimited personal liability for the firm, the structure the bank preserves to this day. Five generations of the Bordier family have led the house since. Ami Bordier (1841 to 1920), a scholar as much as a banker, established the name and the unlimited-liability partnership. His sons Pierre and Edouard carried it through the early twentieth century. A third generation of cousins steered it through the Depression, the franc devaluation of the 1930s and the Second World War. Philippe and André Bordier took the helm in 1966 and led it alone from 1974. The fifth generation, the sons of André Bordier, entered around the firm’s 150th anniversary in 1994; Grégoire Bordier and, later, Evrard Bordier are its managing partners today. The family long ago distilled its temperament into five words attributed to the founder, clairvoyance, work, honesty, prudence and economy, and adopted the oak as its emblem, a symbol, in the words of one Bordier of the third generation, of solidity and endurance. The firm’s archives preserve the texture of that stewardship. In August 1914, as war broke out, Ami Bordier wrote to his son of sleepless nights spent worrying “not for me and mine, but for our clients, who are our friends in difficulty”. On the firm’s centenary in 1944, a Geneva newspaper observed that no other house in Switzerland could claim, as Bordier could, that all of its partners belonged to the same family and bore the same name, calling it “a family bank, a Geneva prototype, the symbol of a tradition and a continuity of spirit”. The continuity has not been accidental: the firm admitted its first non-family partner only in 1992, deliberately, to bridge the generations rather than dilute them.

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A timeline of continuity

1844 Jaques Reverdin opens a stockbroking house in Geneva. 1850 Reverdin helps found the Société des Agents de Change, a forerunner of the Geneva stock exchange. 1888 Ami Bordier becomes a partner. 1895 On Reverdin’s death the firm is renamed Bordier & Cie, a limited partnership with Ami Bordier as sole managing partner bearing unlimited liability. 1906 The bank establishes its long-standing Geneva home at rue de Hollande 16. 1909 Admitted to the Union Financière de Genève. 1936 to 1938 The third generation of Bordier partners takes office; the house weathers the Depression and the franc devaluation. 1944 The firm marks its centenary. 1966 Philippe and André Bordier, the fourth generation, become partners; sole partners from 1974. 1977 Bordier is among the co-founders of the Swiss banks’ Convention de diligence, the industry’s due-diligence agreement. 1992 Pierre Poncet becomes the firm’s first non-family partner, brought in to bridge the generations. 1994 The 150th anniversary; the fifth generation begins to join the firm. 1995 A dedicated research department is established. 1997 to 2011 The firm builds its international network: Zurich (1997), Bern (1999), London (2001), Nyon (2005), Paris (2006), Montevideo (2007) and Singapore (2011). 2008 Bordier comes through the global financial crisis without a single redundancy. 2020 The firm adopts the Société en Commandite par Actions (SCmA) form, preserving unlimited partner liability; Christian Skaanild joins as a partner. 2021 In February, Bordier & Cie SCmA becomes the first bank to launch on Sygnum’s B2B banking platform, giving eligible clients regulated, execution-only access to cryptocurrencies alongside the rest of their wealth. 2023 In November, Bordier & Cie (Singapore) Ltd is announced as Sygnum Singapore’s first B2B partner bank, extending the digital-asset service to Asia. 2024 The bank marks its 180th anniversary. 2026 In September, Nicolas Porchet, who joined Bordier & Cie in 2019 as Head of Business Development, is appointed Managing Partner with unlimited liability, the fourth to hold that office.

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The private-banker house

As one of the last Swiss houses to retain the private-banker structure, Bordier carries the obligations of that status further than most. It is a member of the Swiss Private Bankers Association, and its senior partner, Grégoire Bordier, has chaired the Association of Swiss Private Banks (ABPS) since 2021. The firm is wholly dedicated to private banking: it runs no investment-banking book, takes no speculative proprietary positions, and extends no credit beyond loans secured against clients’ own portfolios.

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The values that hold across generations

Bordier articulates its character through four values it calls timeless, responsibility, absolute independence, a long-term vision and availability, and a set of differentiators it gathers under the word FIBRE. Family means no external shareholders and no cross-selling, and therefore no structural conflicts of interest; the firm describes its independence as keeping it unconflicted, unencumbered and undistracted. Innovation is a willingness to adopt new disciplines early, from private equity to regulated digital assets. Bespoke is the practice of building portfolios and relationships to the individual client rather than to a product shelf. Reliable speaks to long operation, a strong balance sheet, a focus on capital preservation, and partners whose own wealth is at risk. Evolving is the firm’s term for quick, partner-level decision-making and a high tolerance for change. Taken together, these are the qualities a family looks for in an institution it intends to keep for generations.

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An investment philosophy built on preservation

Grégoire Bordier states the firm’s independence plainly: “We are free to focus exclusively on our clients’ objectives.” That freedom is structural. With no outside shareholders to satisfy and the partners’ own fortunes at stake, the bank’s interests are aligned with a family’s over decades rather than quarters. The investment approach follows from this. The stated objective is capital preservation first. In the firm’s own words, “capital preservation is the most powerful driver of long-term performance, and long-term performance is achieved first and foremost by capitalising on the money you have managed not to lose.” Portfolios are built to be resilient in downturns, on the reasoning that compounding works only on capital that has not been lost; the discipline is summarised internally as “protect, compound and grow”. This is the practical form of patient capital, the willingness to hold a considered course through cycles rather than chase performance, which the Endure principle identifies as decisive for wealth that must last. The firm frames the lessons of its own survival as a short set of rules for weathering market downturns: never rest on past success; practise moderation, neither over-hiring nor chasing an unreasonable rate of growth; innovate to preserve wealth; treat a smaller, human scale as a strength rather than a constraint; embrace change; and remember the bad times. It was this temperament, by its own account, that allowed it to come through 2008 without a single redundancy. The same disposition governs how Bordier thinks about trust. “We thought that secrecy was a key selling point,” Grégoire Bordier has reflected, “but today we see that we were wide off the mark. Trust is the central factor in the relationship between clients and their bank.” For a family planning across generations, the distinction between confidentiality as a product and trust as a relationship is also the distinction between a vendor and a steward.

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The investment approach in depth

That discipline is expressed across the firm’s asset-class work, and that expression is the operational form of the Endure principle: patience, durability, and the compounding that follows from not losing capital in periods of correction. Asset allocation is matched to the family’s circumstances through four risk-graded strategies. Income carries the lowest risk and the shortest horizon and leans towards fixed-income investments. Defensive and Balanced sit progressively further along the risk scale, with longer horizons and a rising weight of risk assets. Growth carries the highest risk allocation and the longest horizon, suited to families investing across more than a decade. The strategy a family adopts is determined by its own objectives, time horizon and tolerance for volatility, not by a house view imposed uniformly.

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Equities

At the centre of the approach sits the Core Holdings, the companies Bordier describes as “virtuous”: businesses that generate free cash flow and create economic value, of which only around one in six pass the firm’s eligibility screen. Eligible companies are then bought only at the right price, with fair value established through a discounted-cash-flow approach and tracked against price over time, so that selection is governed by valuation discipline rather than sentiment. Around this core, a smaller allocation of opportunistic satellites pursues shorter to medium-horizon, alpha-driven opportunities in secondary research, regulated sectors, deep cyclicals and special situations, judged on relative valuation. Sustainability is assessed throughout the equity process, with environmental, social and governance analysis and rating carried out through an external ratings provider. Fixed income is run by an experienced team applying a proprietary framework that combines macroeconomic, quantitative and qualitative analysis. The firm publishes an actively managed recommendation list of around 600 bonds across the major currencies (USD, EUR, CHF and GBP), with a multi-sector and multi-region approach spanning investment grade, high yield and hybrid markets. Selection is bottom-up, independent and risk-aware, transcending traditional agency ratings, and is governed by a disciplined quality framework that has produced a long record of avoiding defaults. The funds offering is a 360-degree range built to be complete and coherent, spanning traditional strategies (equities, bonds and commodities), alternative strategies (hedge funds) and thematic strategies including climate transition and emerging technologies. Internal funds draw on the in-house Research Department of economists, equity analysts and credit analysts, and are managed with the same discipline applied to the largest portfolios: low turnover and a long-term approach through short-term noise. Alongside traditional exposures, the firm allocates to non-traditional, decorrelating asset classes that it nicknames “exoplanets”, chosen for their independence from conventional market drivers. Private equity is delivered through the Bordier Private Equity Club, organised around four commitments to clients: Access, Advice, Alignment and Accompaniment. The Club provides access to top funds and to fund managers’ investment teams at a lower minimum ticket than direct institutional commitments would require; bespoke portfolio building across venture, growth, buyout, secondaries, infrastructure and private debt; and ongoing accompaniment through performance reporting, updates on portfolio companies and cash-flow planning. Alignment is reinforced by the firm’s unlimited-liability structure and by the partners co-investing in each selected fund alongside clients. In structured products, Bordier is deliberately an independent buyer rather than an issuer. Because it does not issue these products itself, it runs a competitive process across more than fifteen counterparties, to secure competitive pricing and structures in the client’s interest, with each product monitored through its lifecycle and reviewed at maturity. The firm also provides dedicated foreign-exchange and precious-metals advisory, offering tailored hedging and yield-enhancement solutions with end-to-end support from structuring through execution to monitoring. Responsible and impact investing runs through the whole architecture rather than sitting beside it.

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Services for families across generations

Bordier’s work is organised into three principal offerings, each addressing a dimension of the Continuity Compact. Wealth Management couples discretionary, advisory and execution mandates with portfolio consolidation, Lombard lending against a client’s own portfolio, and a wealth-planning practice that handles succession, retirement, cross-border structuring, relocation and philanthropy, the Prepare and Communicate work of readying a family and its next generation. Private Asset Management brings institutional-grade, benchmarked portfolio management to private families. Family Services, described earlier in this paper, gathers the Govern machinery of the relationship: an outsourced chief-investment-officer function, multi-custody consolidation, and a formal investment-governance process. The specialised services set out below sit alongside these three.

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The full range of services

Family Services, described earlier in this paper, gathers part of the machinery of the relationship: an outsourced chief-investment-officer function, multi-custody consolidation, and a formal investment-governance process. The specialised services set out below sit alongside these three. Beyond core portfolio management, Bordier offers a set of specialised services that a multi-generational family can assemble to suit its structure, and several map directly onto the Continuity Compact. Managed bond solutions bring institutional fixed-income management to private clients. The same objective-driven, globally diversified approach is offered through three vehicles depending on size: UCITS funds for all investment sizes, segregated managed accounts above a higher threshold with a greater degree of customisation, and fully bespoke managed solutions for the largest mandates. This lets a family scale the sophistication of its fixed-income management as its wealth grows, an expression of the Endure principle’s emphasis on durable, scalable structures. Multibooking addresses families whose assets are spread across several custodians. Through a single relationship manager and one entry point, Bordier oversees and consolidates accounts a family holds at other banks, producing a consolidated view of the entire asset base and improved oversight of risk. For families that have deliberately diversified across institutions, this supports the Govern principle by giving them one coherent picture on which to base decisions. Bordier FinLab is the group’s innovation unit, charged with seeking and offering new investment solutions across asset classes including private debt, complex structured products, private equity, and traditional and non-traditional funds. It looks beyond established frameworks and provides intelligence on developments affecting the industry, so that a family’s strategy can evolve without compromising the firm’s core discipline. Lombard loans provide asset-backed lending against a family’s own portfolio, available from a defined minimum, with the loanable amount set as a percentage of the market value of pledged liquid assets such as equities, bonds, investment funds and precious metals. This allows a family to meet a short-term liquidity need or act on an investment opportunity without selling assets and interrupting the compounding the family is relying on over the long term. For digital assets, Bordier offers regulated, execution-only access through Sygnum, a licensed digital-asset bank, in Switzerland since 2021 and in Singapore since 2023, so that families wishing to hold a measured allocation can do so within the same relationship, the same consolidated reporting and the same standards of oversight applied to the rest of their wealth. The service is described on Digital assets. A dedicated service for independent asset managers gives external managers and their clients access to Bordier’s trading room, research teams and wider expertise through a dedicated team and a secure technology platform, extending the firm’s discipline to families served through their own advisers. The modular outsourced single-family office is designed for families that want the function of a single-family office without building one. The family retains control as powerholders while Bordier coordinates investment governance, an outsourced chief-investment-officer function, multi-custody consolidation and custody and banking across the family’s vehicles. There is no need to change existing banking relationships. This is the clearest expression of the Govern and Endure principles in service form, providing the documented decision rights and continuity of oversight a family needs across generations. Finally, retirement and occupational-pension planning gives a family a comprehensive, long-horizon view of its assets, liabilities, pensions and inheritance together, with forecasts over decades and tax-efficient solutions, supporting the Prepare and Communicate principles by making the family’s long-term picture explicit and shared. Two of these speak directly to the causes of failure this paper has set out. The wealth-transfer practice exists to anticipate the legal and tax complexity that, left unaddressed, hardens into dispute. And the family-governance work, the charter, the council, the investment policy statement, the committee, is the machinery through which the human causes of failure, poor communication and unprepared heirs, are confronted before a transition rather than after it. A family whose decision rights are written down, whose assets are consolidated and visible, and whose conversations are facilitated by a neutral, long-tenured institution is a family practising the Continuity Compact, whatever it chooses to call it.

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A global network

Bordier serves families from twelve offices in six countries across three continents. In Switzerland, the licensed bank operates from Geneva, where the firm has had its home at rue de Hollande 16 since 1906, together with Nyon, Lausanne, Bern and Zurich. In France, an investment-management company operates from Paris, Brest and Rennes. In the United Kingdom the group is present in London; in Asia, through a licensed bank in Singapore that opens onto the wider Asian region; and in the Americas, through an advisory company in Montevideo, Uruguay, and in the Turks and Caicos Islands. For families whose members and assets are dispersed across jurisdictions, this footprint means the same institution, and the same understanding of the family’s structures and values, travels with them rather than being rebuilt from nothing at each border.