London vault only for billionaires set to open for commercial purposes

A London vault in a grade-II listed 120-year-old former mansion next to the Dorchester Hotel on London’s Park Lane will open for commercial purposes from next week. The managing director of the facility, Sean Hoey said that they won't be dealing with millionaires but only with billionaires. He said that it is not an ordinary bank. Hoey shifted to IBV from Harrods where he was in charge of the Knightsbridge department store’s safety deposit boxes. He claimed that the new site would be far more exclusive and safer than Harrods. It is definitely going to cost more. He added that it will be the most expensive safety deposit box in London and in fact in the world. He said that the deposit box depends on how much the customers pay for it.

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Entire room to cost £2.5m per year

The cheapest safety box which is 5 cm high, 16 cm wide and 49 cm deep will cost £600-a-year in rent. It can be compared to £465 for a box twice the size in Harrods and £240 in Metro Bank which is the UK's largest supplier of safety deposit boxes containing 1,50,000 boxes across 70 branches. Hoey said that even the smallest box is going to cost a lot more and added that a few gold bars are only the size of the mobile phone. The entire room is going to cost  £2.5 million a year. IBV is owned by South African multimillionaire Ashok Sewnarain. He said that he was opening the London vault due to an increase in demand from the world’s wealthiest people for safety lockers fearing the possible reaction against rising inequality.

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Vault secured with steel-lined walls, ceiling

He also added that the wealthy people fear the possible impact of a climate crisis and have started to store their wealth into gold bars as banks begin to charge them to store cash deposits. He said that the bank vault is located in Stanhope House which is a gothic-style mansion built-in 1899 for soap magnate Robert William Hudson. Sewnarain has purchased a Rolls-Royce which can be booked to ferry customers to and from the vault. When the customers will arrive at the site they will be greeted by two doormen who will escort them through the security which includes fingerprint and iris scanner to open doors of the vault. Then the persons in charge will help customers collect their boxes. The vault is secured with steel-lined walls, ceiling, and floor to prevent robbers from tunneling underneath.

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