Bank and Clients
bank based in London, UK
Bank and Clients plc was a British private bank, which was formed by combining: Church House Trust, a retail bank founded in 1978 and Ocean Capital, a specialist corporate lender founded in 2002. B&C was based in London, England.
In January 2010 the former Church House Trust plc was acquired by Virgin Money as a way for the Virgin Group to gain a banking licence to begin a retail banking operation. The investments division was not included in the acquisition, and continues to operate independently as Church House Investments in Sherborne.
Virgin Money sold Church House to Ocean Industries S.A. in 2014, and it was merged with Ocean Capital to become Bank and Clients. Former HSBC Mexico Chief Executive Officer Sandy Flockhart was named chairman in December 2014, and was replaced in early 2016 by the Conservative peer, Lord Strathclyde.
History
Origins
The origins of Church House can be traced back to 1792 when Edward Batten formed Messrs. Batten & Co. Batten was the senior of three partners and was later joined by his son John Batten in 1829. After a number of mergers and acquisitions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century the bank grew, until a number of the members of the Batten family were casualties of the First World War, leading to the company being purchased by what became the Westminster Bank.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1089717. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978, 2002, 2010 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bank and Clients” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.