Jeremy Marshall, the first head of Hoares Bank from outside the family – obituary

Jeremy Marshall, who has died aged 60, was the first non-family chief executive of C Hoare & Co, the UK’s oldest private bank – and a passionate evangelist who lent his skills and enthusiasm to a wide range of Christian causes and projects.

After an international career with Credit Suisse, Marshall was headhunted in 2009 to take the reins at Hoares, the exclusive Fleet Street bank that dates its foundation to 1672 and had previously been run by family partners in seamless succession through 11 generations.

His brief to expand the bank’s wealth management business was driven forward with a combination of integrity, humility and professionalism that won customers’ trust and endeared him to colleagues. One passing him in a corridor asked why he was smiling so broadly: “I like this place,” he replied simply. The bank’s partners called him “a shining example of [our] values, a loyal friend and an excellent banker.”

Diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2015 – told he might live 18 months, he felt blessed to survive eight years – Marshall retired from Hoares in April 2016 to devote himself to the evangelical faith that had been essential to him throughout his life. He supported Christian charities at home and abroad, and in 2020 he led the acquisition of Kingdom Bank, a specialist lender owned by the Pentecostalist denomination Assemblies of God.

Founded in the 1950s to manage the Assemblies’ congregational funds, Kingdom had been authorised and regulated as a bank since the 1980s. When Marshall learnt it was for sale, he gathered a group of like-minded investors – anchored by the evangelical charity Stewardship, which took a 35 per cent stake – to conserve its heritage and inject capital for expansion.

Dedicated, as he put it, to “the glorification of the Lord Jesus Christ”, under Marshall’s leadership Kingdom developed its online range of savings and loan products, and insurance services for churches, charities, missionaries and Christian workers.

The Nottingham-based institution’s unique character and purpose derived from the fact that “our staff are all Christians… Often they pray with their customers,” Marshall told an interviewer. By better serving local churches and their communities, it would “help spread the gospel… across our needy nation.”

Jeremy Samuel John Marshall was born on May 8 1963 in Hemel Hempstead, the son of John Evans Marshall – minister for 45 years of the Hertfordshire town’s Alexandra Road Congregational Church – and his wife Susan, née Westcott.

A celebrated preacher who had found his calling as an Oxford undergraduate in 1954 when he heard the American evangelist Billy Graham, John Marshall led his wife and children on expeditions behind the Iron Curtain to smuggle bibles to the faithful. Not knowing how other families spent their summers, the young Jeremy assumed this was a conventional holiday.

Educated at Hemel Hempstead School, Jeremy went on to study at St John’s College, Cambridge, and later to take an MBA at Insead. His City career began with Barclays and Bank of Montreal before he moved in 1988 to Credit Suisse, where he stayed for more than 20 years, serving in Zurich and New York before becoming head of UK private banking in 2002.

Jeremy Marshall was chairman of Pastor Training International, Christian Books Worldwide and Christianity Explored, a trustee of the London Theological Seminary and a supporter of the London City Mission. Further afield, he helped the Christian church in Serbia and bible seminaries in South Africa. He was also a trustee of Woodland Trust.

He was an enthusiastic member of Hoares’ cricket team, in which he also persuaded his sons to play. He married, in 1987, Jeanette Bonsels, who survives him with their daughter and two sons.

Jeremy Marshall, born May 8 1963, died August 13 2023