Financial Services

St. Louis is a national center of banking, finance, and insurance. 82,000 St. Louisans - over 7% of the region's payroll employment - work in the financial activities sector at banks, investment firms, insurance companies, or in real estate. The average annual pay in the industry, approximately $54,000, exceeds the $43,000 regional average for all industries.

Investment and Securities Firms

St. Louis is home to several national investment firms, including Wells Fargo Advisors, Edward Jones, Scottrade, and Stifel-Nicolaus. In 2007, Wachovia Corporation acquired A.G. Edwards. About a year later, Wachovia Corp. was in turn acquired by Wells Fargo & Co. and is now known as Wells Fargo Advisors. Wells Fargo Advisors, formerly Wachovia Securities, expanded its workforce in 2008 and employs 4,800 people in St. Louis and a total of 20,000 around the country.

Edward Jones is a large, privately-held investment company with over 8,600 branch offices throughout the United States. Jim Weddle, the managing partner of Edward Jones, was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal describing the firm as, “The decidedly un-Wall Street firm that prides itself on its down-home Midwestern image.”  The firm also recently announced plans to expand its St. Louis area operations by investing $260 million in a new facility and hiring up to 1,000 additional workers over 10 years.

Scottrade is a leading discount internet stock brokerage firm that has benefitted from recent market volatility. The number of active accounts grew in 2008, prompting plans to hire 500 people and add 58 branches. Scottrade currently employs 2,500 people around the country, including 1,000 workers in St. Louis. Scottrade ranked number 60 in Fortune magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2009. In 2007, Scottrade moved to a new 34,000-square-foot data center, implementing a major redesign of the firm's IT infrastructure. The advanced data center provides the capability for processing up to 1 million transactions per day.

Stifel-Nicolaus, is a full service brokerage and investment firm founded in St. Louis in 1890, and is part of the Russell 3000 Index. In 2005, they took a bold step when they acquired Legg Mason Capital Markets from Citigroup. Through that acquistion, Stifel-Nicolaus expanded its operations to include 154 offices in 28 states. In 2006, they continued their planned expansion in the East and Southeast with the acquistion of Ryan Beck Holdings, Inc., a financial advisory firm with approximately 400 financial consultants and $19 billion in client assets under management.

Venture Capital

There are a variety of mid-sized investment and venture capital firms in greater St. Louis. These include Advantage Capital, Ascension Health Ventures, Gateway Associates, Prolog Ventures, and RiverVest Venture Partners. Local venture capital firms have a total of $1.6 billion under management through their various investment funds. The St. Louis region has continued its progress toward becom­ing one of the major centers for venture capital in the central United States. These local venture capital firms, along with significant outside investors, committed $115 million to St. Louis companies in 2005 with almost $1 billion invested since 2000.

In 2005, the St. Louis RCGA and the Nidus Center for Scientific Enterprise launched the St. Louis Arch Angel Network. The Arch Angel Network, with almost 50 members, provides early stage financing to local startups. From inception in 2005 through 2006 it has invested approximately $5 million in five early stage companies. These investors and the growing network of startup incubators and support organizations is strengthening the entrepreneurial environment in St. Louis. Venture capital is a key component to commercializing St. Louis’ strong university research and building the area’s reputation as a center for life sciences.

Banking

St. Louis is the regional headquarters for several large banks. Bank of America, Commerce Bank, National City, Regions Bank, UMB Bank, and U.S. Bancorp all have large operations in St. Louis. In June 2008, 145 different local, regional, and national banks had a total of $57.8 billion deposited in St. Louis area branches. The largest of the St. Louis-based banks, with overall deposits between approximate­ly $1 and $10 billion were First Bank, Southwest Bank of St. Louis, Enterprise Bank & Trust, First National Bank of St. Louis, Reliance Bank, The Bank of Edwardsville, Midwest BankCentre, and Pulaski Bank. These and other banks headquartered in St. Louis had a total of $33.9 billion in deposits both in St. Louis branches and nationally.

These banks not only serve local businesses and consumers, but also play important roles in the region’s economic development. U.S. Bancorp’s Community Development Corporation (USBCDC), for example, has been an active development partner through the use of New Market and Historic Preservation tax credits. Kathy Bader, the chairman of the USBCDC, is part of a US Bancorp leadership team that was recently recognized by US Banker magazine as the best team of female executives in the banking industry.

In 2000, MasterCard Worldwide opened its global technology operations center in suburban O’Fallon, Missouri. This 500,000-square-foot facility processes every transaction in the world that involves a MasterCard – as many as 20 million per day.

St. Louis is also home to the headquarters of CitiMortgage, Citigroup’s mortgage lending subsidiary. CitiMortgage employs 3,800 people in St. Louis and has a $90 billion portfolio.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which oversees banking activity in the Federal Reserve’s 8th District, recently expanded its offices in downtown St. Louis. The 8th district’s territory includes all of Arkansas, and parts of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee.

Insurance

Approximately 21,600 people work at over 2,200 insurance related businesses in the St. Louis region. Many of them work in the offices of individual brokers, representing nearly every major insurance carrier, but there are also some insurance companies with a larger presence in St. Louis.

Fireman’s Fund Insurance is relocating to a 110,000-square-foot office building in O'Fallon, MO at the end of 2009. Fireman's Fund Insurance, which is headquartered in San Francisco, has 500 local customer service and claims employees. The St. Louis-area office is the base for Fireman's Fund Insurance's catastrophe (CAT) center, which responds to disasters nationwide.

Centene, a publicly traded Fortune 1000 healthcare enterprise, has announced plans to expand its headquarters in Clayton, Missouri with a new 481,000-square-foot building, projecting 800 new jobs by 2010.

In February 2009, WellPoint, Inc., parent of , announced plans to consolidate operations in a 465,000-square-foot building in St. Louis City. The company will relocate 300 employees from Creve Coeur to join the 800 employees currently located in downtown St. Louis.

Real Estate

A number of commercial real estate firms, and the many residential-oriented real estate, rental and leasing firms that one would expect for a metropolitan area of 2.8 million people, operate in the St. Louis region. Major firms in St. Louis include Colliers Turley Martin Tucker, CB Richard Ellis, Duke Realty, and Coldwell Banker, East County Enterprises, Gateway Commercial/Cushman & Wakefield Alliance, McEagle Properties, Opus Northwest, and Pace Properties

Accounting and Bookkeeping

The 21 Fortune 1,000 companies headquartered in the St. Louis region are served by a diverse and mature group of accounting and financial analysis firms. National accounting firms such as Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers have offices in the region, and there are a number of large and mid-sized regional accounting firms, including Anders Minkler & Diehl, Brown Smith Wallace, MPP & W and RubinBrown LLP located in the region.

Summary

Greater St. Louis’ financial services industry includes a thriving and diverse array of local, regional, and national firms. Business­es in St. Louis that need financial services will find the services they need, and financial service firms looking to grow will find all the resources they need. Finance is an important growing part of the St. Louis region’s economy. From 1992 to 2007, employment in St. Louis’ financial sector has grown by about 11,000.

SECTION LINKS  Financial Services Profile