Family-office Lombard lending.

Family-office Lombard lending is private credit arranged within a family's trust, holding-company, or succession structure, secured by a pledge of the family’s listed shares. The office draws liquidity against the diversified book it already owns — to diversify further, to fund new commitments, or to bridge a transfer between generations — while the core portfolio stays invested and keeps compounding. It is a loan, not a disposal, so the family's long-term positions and their tax basis remain untouched.

Why a family office uses Lombard credit

A family office manages patient capital, and its instinct is to hold, so it uses Lombard credit to meet three recurring needs without selling: diversification, deployment, and timing. The first is diversification: a family whose wealth grew from one business is often over-exposed to a single legacy holding, and wants to spread risk without selling the position that built the fortune.

Deployment is the second need: the office sees an opportunity (a co-investment, a private-market commitment, a real asset) and would rather borrow against the listed book than liquidate it to fund the cheque. The third is timing: liquidity is needed at a moment when selling is unattractive, whether because of market conditions, a tax year, or a family event. A Lombard loan answers all three by releasing cash against the portfolio while leaving the portfolio in place.

Structuring within a trust or holding structure

In a trust or holding structure, the borrower and the pledgor are the entities that hold legal title, and their authority to borrow and to grant security has to be confirmed against the trust deed or the constitutional documents before anything is signed. The distinctive work in a family-office facility is fitting it to the family's existing architecture.

The securities are rarely held in a single personal name; they sit in trusts, holding companies, or special-purpose vehicles, often across more than one jurisdiction. Where the trust deed requires it, trustee resolutions and beneficiary considerations are addressed with the family's own counsel. The facility is documented to respect the governance the family has already built, not to cut across it — and confidentiality, always important to a family office, is preserved throughout.

Calibration and portfolio effects

A family book is usually the most favourable kind of collateral, because it is diversified. Spreading the pledge across many liquid, large-capitalisation names lets a lender value and, if ever necessary, realise the collateral with confidence, which supports a higher loan-to-value than a single concentrated position would command. Holdings scattered across several custodians can be consolidated into one collateral pool, each line assessed on its own liquidity and volatility.

Recourse is chosen to match the family's appetite for asset protection: a structure that ring-fences other family assets is common where the priority is to insulate the wider estate. Tenor is set to the purpose — a deployment facility is sized to the horizon of the investment it funds — and pricing follows the usual reference-rate-plus-spread pattern, with no rate card.

For families managing a generational transfer, a facility can bridge the liquidity a succession event demands without forcing a sale at the wrong moment. Succession bridging and downstream deployment are covered in more depth in Lombard loans for family offices.

Structuring at a glance

For a family office, the borrower is the entity that holds title (a trustee, holding company, or SPV), the collateral is a diversified portfolio of listed shares that can be consolidated across custodians, and recourse is calibrated to the family's asset-protection preferences. Eligibility follows the criteria in who qualifies for a Lombard loan.