Cambridge College Trinity Hall Buys a Bank

Since its founding in 1350, Trinity Hall, one of the University of Cambridge’s 31 colleges, has endured the Plague and the English Reformation. Now it’s taking on the banking business. To bolster its endowment, Trinity Hall last year bought half the assets of a troubled regional lender previously controlled by Vladimir Antonov, an ex-owner of the Portsmouth Football Club who’s facing fraud charges in Lithuania. “The perception coming into this process was that banking was a casino business,” says Simon Guest, an engineering instructor at Trinity Hall and a member of its investment committee. “If you stepped back and looked at the big picture, you saw that this could be a highly successful investment.”

Making money is increasingly important for Cambridge and its colleges because the U.K. has cut spending on higher education, prompting street protests against Prime Minister David Cameron’s austerity regime. Cambridge now gets just a third of its funding for teaching and research from the government, down from 50 percent a decade ago. Some colleges, including Trinity Hall, are venturing into riskier investments once unheard of for conservative academic institutions. “The university needs to be more reliant on its endowment and diverse in its investments,” says Trinity Hall Master Martin Daunton, a professor of economic history.