Borrow against shares, without selling.

Yes — you can borrow against shares without selling them. A Lombard loan advances cash against a pledge of your shares rather than a sale: you pledge the shares as collateral, draw a fraction of their value in cash, and recover them in full on repayment. Because the shares are pledged and not disposed of, you keep ownership, dividends, voting rights, and the upside, and you defer the disposal that a sale would represent.

The short answer: pledge, not sale

Selling and borrowing look similar from a distance — both put cash in your hands — but they are opposite in substance. A sale transfers ownership of the shares to a buyer and ends your position. A Lombard loan keeps ownership with you and gives the lender security over the shares until the loan is repaid. The shares sit with a qualified custodian under a pledge; you draw cash against a fraction of their value; and when you repay, the pledge is released and your control is unencumbered once more. Nothing has been disposed of.

What you keep

Because the shares remain yours, so do the things that come with owning them. You keep the economic exposure: if the shares rise, the gain is yours, not a buyer's. You generally keep the dividends and the voting rights, subject to how the facility is structured. And you keep optionality — the ability to hold a position you believe in, or one you are restricted from selling, while still raising liquidity against it. For a founder or controlling shareholder, that last point is often the whole reason to borrow rather than sell: a sale would signal something to the market and surrender control, where a pledge does neither.

What you defer

A sale is a disposal, and a disposal is the moment a tax charge can crystallise. A pledge is not a disposal, so while the loan is outstanding and the shares are retained, that event is generally deferred. This can matter a great deal for a concentrated holder sitting on a large unrealised gain — but the treatment depends entirely on your jurisdiction and circumstances. This page is not tax advice. The tax point is one reason holders borrow rather than sell, but you should take professional advice on your own position before acting on it.

Restricted and lock-up shares

Shares are not always freely transferable. A recently listed company's insiders may be under a lock-up; senior holders may face insider-dealing restrictions or blackout periods; and some holdings carry contractual limits on transfer. In some of these cases the shares can still be pledged for a loan even though they cannot readily be sold — but only where the issuer's rules, the terms of the lock-up, and applicable securities law permit it. This is precise, case-by-case work: whether a pledge is possible, and on what terms, has to be established before anything is arranged. It is one of the areas where structuring, rather than the headline product, does the heavy lifting.

Sell vs borrow, side by side

The choice is not that borrowing is always better than selling — it is that they do different things. The table sets out the trade-off.

The trade-offs

Borrowing is not free, and it is not for every situation. You take on interest, you commit to maintaining the collateral for the term, and you raise a fraction of the value rather than the whole. If you have no wish to keep the shares, and no tax or disclosure reason to hold them, a sale may simply be cleaner. Borrowing earns its place when you want liquidity and want to keep the position — for its upside, its income, its control, or because selling is restricted or ill-timed. For a fuller comparison against other routes, see liquidity options compared; for the amount you could raise, see how much you can borrow against shares.