Banks

 

The Bank of Uleila

Named for the Goddess of Weaving, the Bank of Uleila began as a collective of traders principally invested in insuring the silk industry, and associated textile traders in Jumira. They expanded to insure not only silk traders, but silkworm farmers, spider farmers, and traders in fabrics and dyes of all kinds. With the development of increasingly complex looms and other tools, they also began to develop mechanical calculating machines that could perform complex calculations and weave the results into cloth ledgers. In Jumira, it is not uncommon for the wealthy to have their clothes woven from the fabrics used to keep their ledgers from previous years.

The organization grew incredibly wealthy during the Imperial Era as the demands for fine fabrics and regalia reached an all time high, and they were instrumental in providing loans to the different Empires during their expansionist phase. The leadership of the Bank was savvy enough to call in the majority of their loans early, and so avoided serious losses that might have been incurred as the Empires collapsed.

The Four Winds Bank

Like most of the large banks that arose in the Imperial Era, the Four Winds Bank got it's start by providing insurance to ships enaged in trade - in this case centered in the Great Sprial Sea. Because of the counter-clockwise motion fo the prevailing winds and currents in the Great Sprial Sea, shipping with the flow of wind and wave is significantly more profitable and less dangerous than shipping the otehr direction. Unfortunately for smaller shipping companies, doing annual laps around the entire sea is too complicated to manage logistically, so they were forced to sail both ways. The Four Wind's Bank began as a brokerage house that helped mitigate some of this risk through good speculative practices, but evolved to providing insurance and therein found their niche.

Originally headquartered in Shahaifor, Ayodesh the Four Winds Bank was almost bankrupted by the loss of many of their records and assets in the Great Fire of 1231. While they still maintained major offices in Mandala and Mudinak, and smaller ones in Blue Harbour and Cairgherd, it was not clear they would recover until a large number of independent ship owners began showing up in their regional offices, paying their premiums voluntarily and providing their own copies of contracts and records that would otherwise have been lost. While thousands of ship owners could have cheated this system, it seems that they realized that a failed Four Winds Bank would be replaced by less competant, more predatory insurers offering higher rates.

Having survived the crisis, the Four Winds Bank re-emerged with a strong push to support the reconstruction of Shahaifor, and they are currently one of the most respected organizations in all of western Tear.

The Grain Bank of Bulostioi

In the Year 1313, the Grain Bank of Bulostioi was chartered by the Halfling Barbagu Family to begin buying up farmland and employing workers from the cities to work the fields. The land was cheap, and many people were hungry enough to give up their city life and take up back-breaking field work in exchange for a chance to eat. As the Grain Bank expanded, it became apparent that the real benefit was not in employing starving city folk to work the fields and feed themselves, but rather in creating a centralized organization in control of a large food supply that Charter Cities could negotiate with.

Autonomous individual farmers had been reluctant to sell food as long as their own families were going hungry, but The Grain Bank was able to put a price on a bushel of wheat. That price was exorbitant at first, but by 1315, the Cities would pay almost anything to avoid food riots, or the need to start conquering and holding lands.

The Grain Bank began purchasing failing land around the world when it was literally dirt cheap. Their sparse yields were not enough, but because they owned it and the workers did not, they could impose rationing and provide a lifeline to the Cities. The money from the Cities meant that their farm workers were being paid very well. They might not be able to eat much, but they could build nice houses and have nice clothes. Meanwhile, the Grain Bank was funneling cash into developing more aqueducts and improved farming practices.

The Grain Bank’s massive reinvestment in the land didn’t end the drought; the drought faded on its own as part of a natural climatic cycle. Regardless, by 1318, the Grain Bank of Bulostioi had risen to become one of the largest Companies in the world. Almost every City had some kind of provisional arrangement with The Grain Bank, and the scale of their operation allowed them to price out many independent farmers - forcing them to sell their land and become employees of the Company. By the middle of the Enlightenment, the Grain Bank had land holdings on every continent, and owned and operated approximately 10% of all the arable farm land in the world.

The Kolega Underwriters Company

The Kolega Underwriters Company was formed in Miga, Golanicja in 727 by Ludovic Kolega, the son of a moderately successful dwarven merchant mariner. The original purpose of the company was to bring together wealthy investors and individuals in the Hidden Sea region to offer insurance policies to ships heading through the Passage of Miga to the King's Sea, where they would be under constant threat of attack from Senecian pirates and privateers. The considerable risks involved meant policies were extremely expensive, but also necessary, and Kolega's became almost immediately indispensible, even if they were at constant risk of being overleveraged and bankrupted.

Barely more than a decade later, however, with the formation of the Povidovija Trade Alliance and the creation of the Imperial Merchant Marine the risks the company was underwriting fell off dramatically. This allowed them to massively reduce the cost of their policies; but not by nearly as much as the reduction of their risks.

With sudden access to enormous wealth, Ludovic Kolega and his four daughters worked to diversify the company, making major investments in land, ships, infrastructure, and buying interests in other companies. In 757, only 30 years after it had been founded, Kolega's restructured itself as a bank, maintaining their profitable underwriting business as one of the pillars of their company, but focusing more of their attention on investments and loans.

Wisely, the Kolega family steered clear of making direct connections with the Golanicjan Royal Family, and Ludovic Kolega himself was considered something of a thorn in the side of the Golanicjan nobility. There were countless opportunities for Kolega's daughters to marry into Golanicjan noble houses, but each of them instead chose to reinforce the wealth and power of the family with marriages that expanded business connections and opportunities over marriages that tied them to hereditary wealth and power. Four centuries later, the descendents of House Kolega and the Kolega Underwriters Company were left largely untouched by the financial conseqeunces of the collapse of the Golanicjan Crown.

Meshwahar Gem Holders

The Meshwahar Family made their fortune by mining sapphires, and indeed the city in northern Sekhu where they first began is named for the precious stones. The company has long since diversified its holdings, but the foundation of their fortune continues to stand on their near-total monopoly of the precious gem trade. They primarily function as a bank, wth offices in most major cities, and interests and holdings on every continent. Their primary investments are in mining.

The Saffron Exchange of Mudinak

The Saffron Exchange is both an insurance company and a commodities exchange, principally invested in managing risk in the trade of spices, and dyes in Jumira and Sekhu. The Saffron Exchange began as a simple collective of spice farmers who entered into a profit sharing arrangement in order to manage the risks of flooding, drought, or crop disease or infestation. This risk mitigation brought great stability to a volatile economic sector, and resulted in a wide ranging refinement of best practices in the farming of spice crops, nuts, dye crops, and in cooperation with the Bank of Uleila, to fabric crops and insect farming.

Similar to the Grain Bank, the Saffron Exchange benefitted enormously from the acceleration of agricultural development after the droughts of 1311 through 1317, with the added benefit that many rare and valuable spices, dyes, and fabrics have a very low weight-to-value ratio, allowing them to act as an effective proxy for currency. The vaults of the Saffron Exchange in Mudinak are said to hold hundreds of tons of powdered dyes, rare fabrics, preserved spices, and insect eggs that both act as a reserve for these rare and expensive commodities, but can also be used as a currency. The Saffron Exchange has offices and secure warehouses in most Principle Cities, and can thus exert economic influence around the world.

The Saffron exchange is also notable in that it is one of the only companies in the world that has significant relations with Sectile societies. Sectile interface with humanoid societies is exceedingly rare, but many Sectile workers are employed by the company across Jumira, particularly in the egg farms of Southeastern Jumira, around Anthill, and in Ubanamok, where their expertise and knowledge of insect farming and trade is critical to the company’s operations.

The Sixth Order

The Sixth Order was originally a ragtag band of thugs, mercenaries and pirates who had sarcastically named themselves the Knights of Sixthos after the God of Revelry and Debauchery. When the Imperial wars shifted into high gear in YEAR, the Knights of Sixthos were often around to take contracts for the highest bidder. Mostly through happenstance, the Knights of Sixthos ended up faring better at sea than they did on land, and over the course of a couple of decades, managed to amass a fairly significant fleet. In the waning years of the Imperial Era, it became more profitable for the Knights of Sixthos to sell their services as naval escorts to companies than to send their ships into battle for Empires that were running out of money.

As the Imperial Era ended, the leadership of the Knights of Sixthos - which had always been informal - determined that the most profitable path forward was to incorporate. They renamed themselves the Sixth Order and chartered themselves as a trade company headquartered in Sancelia, and listed among their assets a fleet of over a hundred ships. In reality, they were distributed around the world, and their ships, captains and sailors remained extremely autonomous. In Year 1257, two years before the Enlightenment officially began, the self-styled Grand Admiral Dame Marialola ordered the majority of the fleet be refitted for use as cargo and transport vessels.

By the time the Northwest Whaling Company began selling their sextant in Year 1259, the ships and captains of the Sixth Order were in prime position to take advantage of the opportunity. Due to their military experience, the Sixth Order was the preferred transport company for sending large shipments of valuables or currency - and a lot of currency was changing hands quickly at the time.

The Sixth Order immediately realized that sending a thousand tons of gold from a city in Tulosz to a bank in Jumira, while at the same time, sending a different thousand tons of gold from a bank in Jumira to a city in Tulosz was terribly inefficient. Rather than transporting gold - they began storing and stockpiling it - building up large reserves on several continents. Rather than ship gold across a sea from one party to another, they would store the received gold and send a message across the sea to release the gold stored there to the recipient. Suddenly, the Sixth Order went from being a transport company that mostly worked for banks to being a bank themselves.

The Trade Bank of Bosznel

In 1185, the Kingdom of Tulosz was so indebted to the Widow’s Sea Merchant Company, the Guild of Obrum, and the Stone Union that the Trade Bank of Bosznel was forced to call in Crown’s debts. Unable to put a financing plan in place, King Mihiu IV renounced his debts and refused to pay. With several of the world’s most powerful companies compromised by this potential loss, the Trade Bank of Bosznel ordered the dissolution of the Monarchy and the division of its assets to pay its debts. The King refused to relinquish power, and was subsequently transformed into a rosebush by his Court Wizard Elena Borciu. King Mihiu IV roses were still flourishing in the gardens at the offices of the Trade Bank of Bosznel nearly six centuries later at the start of the Fifth Epoch in 1768.