A Private Bank for Aging BSDs

Forget about stashing your cash with Bank of America, JPMorgan or Citigroup. The real grandfathers of finance take their dough to Fieldpoint Private Bank & Trust. The Greenwich institution was founded by some ex-Merrill Lynch execs, including Dan Tully and David Komansky, in 2008 as a place where senior BSD's can get the top notch service they deserve.

Author:: Zachery Kouwe
Updated:: Jan 14, 2019
Original:: Jun 3, 2010

Forget about stashing your cash with Bank of America, JPMorgan or Citigroup. The real grandfathers of finance take their dough to Fieldpoint Private Bank & Trust. The Greenwich institution was founded by some ex-Merrill Lynch execs, including Dan Tully and David Komansky, in 2008 as a place where senior BSD's can get the top notch service they deserve.

Those who have the wherewithal to bank with Fieldpoint include James Kilts, former CEO of Gillette; private equity pioneer Jerome Kohlberg; John “Launny” Steffens; former Home Depot CEO Bernie Marcus; Ken Langone and Joe Grano. (No, you can't play Dick Fuld and Stan O'Neal)

The bank, which now has $345 million in assets, offers premium services including helping former Time Inc. honcho Reginald Brack refinance his daughter’s apartment, among other things.

The bank helped him revise an outdated estate plan, refinanced his daughter's apartment, put him together with outside money managers he likes, and holds a lot of his cash. Like many relatively small banks, Fieldpoint sometimes turns over deposits above $250,000 (the current FDIC insurance limit) to the Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service (CDARS), which spreads the excess among its network of banks. Because the CDARS system helps to attract deposits, Brack calls it our "electric toaster."

The Millionaire Boys’ Bank [Fortune]

Exhibit A: Friday morning at AQR, August 10. Cliff Asness glanced pensively at a candy-colored array of Marvel superhero figurines lined up along his east-facing window. Spiderman. Captain America. The Hulk. Iron Man. Comic book heroes of his boyhood days on Long Island.--The Quants, by Scott Patterson, page 100. On an August morning, Asness walks to his sun-dappled office windowsill and picks up a Captain America action figure. The hedge-fund mogul owns a panoply of action heroes, from the Hulk to the Silver Surfer, and the comic books that spawned them.--Bloomberg Markets Magazine, October 7, 2010 "Hedge funds charge far too much in general by claiming to be geniuses," says Asness, lounging on a sofa in his corner office, surrounded by foot-high plastic models of comic book heroes.--Fortune, December 19, 2011 As a child, Clifford Scott Asness gave no sign of his future as a Wall Street tycoon. He was born in October 1966 in Queens, New York. When he was four, his family moved to the leafy suburban environs of Roslyn Heights on Long Island. In school Asness received good grades, but his interest in Wall Street didn’t extend beyond the dark towers of Gotham in the pages of Batman. Obsessed with little besides girls and comic books, Asness was a listless teenager, without direction and somewhat overweight. At times he showed signs of a violent temper that would erupt years later when he sat at the helm of his own hedge fund.--The Quants, by Scott Patterson, page 12. “His super-villains are intellectual dishonesty and ignorance,” says Jonathan Beinner, a managing director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and a former classmate of Asness. “When someone offers an opinion that Cliff feels is incorrect or dishonest, whether it be related to investments, politics or pizza, he feels it is his duty to stand up, even if it’s not in his best interest.” Asness admits to a superhero complex. His favorite Marvel comic book character is Captain America, who gains strength with the help of a secret serum and whose shield can be used as an indestructible weapon. Asness has an image of the shield tattooed on his left arm.--Bloomberg Markets Magazine, October 7, 2010 Exhibit B: The above is a rendering of a Batcave that will soon be built in the home of an unnamed Greenwich resident. When it is completed in Novemeber, the spread will include "a Batcomputer, Batmobile, Batsuits, 180 degree film screen, sound effects, gargoyles and even a Bat-themed elevator." The problem? This guy is not only infringing on Asness's territory as resident super hero obsessive/aficionado/scholar-in-residence/neighbor who dresses up and role-plays his character of choice but is apparently too cowardly to show his face or reveal his name so that Cliff might confront him. The other problem? Captain America doesn't have some kind of cool underground lair setup of his own. The only recourse? Someone spends the next couple weeks writing a series of fan fiction that describes his house, and then spends $20 million to have that built. Greenwich Resident Building $2 Million Batcave In Home [CTNews] Dark Knight superfan spends $2MILLION creating home cinema replica of Bruce Wayne's cave [DM]

Turns out mortgages weren’t the only toxic assets that were packaged into CDOs. Small community banks issued billions of dollars in trust preferred securities before the credit crunch as a way to prop up their capital cushions. Problem is, the only way they could sell the so-called TruPS to investors was to bundle them up into CDOs.

May was the worst month for hedge funds since October 2008. The HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index lost 2.6 percent. Don’t tell that to Boaz Weinstein. Yeah, he might have lost $1 billion at Deutsche Bank, but that’s old news. Boaz’s Saba Capital (Hebrew for grandfather) bucked the trend in May, up 1.6 percent for the month and 5.8 percent for the year.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission slapped Goldman Sachs with a subpoena for documents and emails the bank has failed to turn over "in a timely manner," according to a press release from the Commission.

For over three years, the private equity industry’s main lobbying group successfully fought against moves to increase taxes on carried interest. Then, Max Baucus and Sander Levin had to go screw it all up yesterday by slipping carried interest legislation into a big tax and spending bill.