The founding mandate of EUDAICA was not to compete with private banks on product breadth. It was to compete with them on time horizon.
The firm was founded in 2024 by partners who had spent two decades inside private banks. We knew the institutions well, including their virtues. The decision to leave was not a critique of those institutions; it was a decision about a different kind of practice.
The private bank exists to serve many clients across many products across multiple quarters. The horizon of measurement is necessarily short — annual, sometimes quarterly. The pressure to demonstrate activity, to recommend, to allocate, is structural. We do not say this to criticise; we say it to explain why the alternative model exists.
EUDAICA was founded to serve a deliberately small number of households, across decades, with the assumption that the right answer in most quarters is to do less. The economic structure of the firm reflects that. We do not earn a percentage on assets under management in the way the private bank does. We earn a flat retainer that does not increase with the size of the portfolio, and we do not accept retrocessions from any product, manager, or counterparty.
This structure changes what we will and will not recommend. It removes the gravitational pull toward complexity. It removes the gravitational pull toward turnover. It permits us to decline business, and to decline business once accepted, which is something that conventional asset managers cannot meaningfully do.
The choice of crypto as a focus area was not opportunistic. It was a deliberate consequence of the same logic. The discipline required to serve clients in this asset class is harder to fake than in conventional public markets. Holdings either reconcile to chain state or they do not. Yields are either earned by named protocols or they are not. The temptation to confuse activity with stewardship is, paradoxically, more easily resisted in an environment where everything is verifiable.
The fact that crypto is also a difficult asset class for traditional private banks to handle — for regulatory, operational, and cultural reasons — is to our advantage as a firm. We did not choose it for that reason. But we have not minded.
A final note for clients reading this: stewardship is not, despite what the literature occasionally implies, a soft discipline. It is a hard one, conducted across years, in which most of the work is silent. We do not promise activity. We promise considered, occasional intervention, and the long absence of intervention in between.