Type Partnership Revenue 1.3 billion USD Founder W. Averell Harriman | Website bbh.com Number of employees 5,000 | |
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Industry Investment banking
Commercial banking
Private equity
Wealth management
Merger and acquisitions Headquarters New York City, New York, United States Founded 1931, New York City, New York, United States Managing directors Daniel J. Greifenkamp (Head Of Funds) SVPs Vincent D'Angelo (Head Of Risk, Governance), James J. Evans (Portfolio Manager) | ||
Brown brothers harriman co
Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. (BBH) is the oldest and one of the largest private banks in the United States. In 1931, the merger of Brown Brothers & Co. (founded in 1818) and Harriman Brothers & Co. formed the current BBH.
Contents
- Brown brothers harriman co
- Brown brothers harriman co s town center style atrium
- Overview
- History
- Merger
- References
Brown Brothers Harriman is also notable for the number of influential American politicians, government appointees, and Cabinet members who have worked at the company, such as W. Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush, Robert A. Lovett, Richard W. Fisher, Robert Roosa, and Alan Greenspan.
Brown brothers harriman co s town center style atrium
Overview
Brown Brothers Harriman provides advisory, wealth management, commercial banking, and investor services for corporate institutions and High-net-worth individual clients. Alongside commercial banking, the firm provides global custody, foreign exchange, private equity, and merger and acquisitions, investment management for individuals and institutions, personal trust and estate administration, and securities brokerage. Organized as a partnership, BBH has approximately 5,500 staff in 17 offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. Currently, the firm has 38 partners, and acts as custodian and administrator for $3.3 trillion and $1.2 trillion in assets, respectively.
History
After immigrating to Baltimore in 1800 and building a successful linen mercantile trading business, Alexander Brown and his four sons co-founded Alex. Brown & Sons. In 1818, one son, John Alexander Brown, traveled to Philadelphia to establish John A. Brown and Co. In 1825, another son, James Brown, established Brown Brothers & Co. on Pine Street in New York and relocated to Wall Street in 1833, which eventually acquired all other Brown branches in the U.S. Another son, William Brown, had established William Brown & Co. in England in 1810, which was renamed to Brown, Shipley & Co. in 1839, and became a separate entity in 1918.
Following the panic of 1837, Brown Brothers withdrew from most of its lending business. Two of the brothers, John and George, sold their shares in the company to the other two brothers, William and James. During the recovery from this economic turmoil, they chose to focus solely on currency exchange and international trade.
Merger
On January 1, 1931, Brown Brothers & Co. merged with two other business entities, Harriman Brothers & Company, a private bank started with railway money, and W. A. Harriman & Co. to form Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. Founding partners included:
TIME's December 22, 1930 issue announced that the three-way merger featured 11 of 16 Yale graduates as founding partners. Eight of the partners listed above, except for Moreau Delano and Thatcher Brown, were Skull and Bones members.
After the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act, the partners decided to focus on commercial banking, becoming a private bank, and spin its securities marketing and underwriting off into Harriman, Ripley and Company which eventually evolved into Drexel Burnham Lambert via mergers.
Harriman, a partner in the firm, was the ambassador and statesman responsible for the relationship between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. Some historical records of Brown Brothers Harriman and its precursor companies are housed in the manuscript collections at the New-York Historical Society.