St. Louis-based Stifel Financial is buying Business Bancshares, the parent company of The Business Bank of St. Louis, to build out its wealth management offerings. The sale price and terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Business Bank will operate as a separate subsidiary to support the business banking needs of Stifel’s Global Wealth Management clients as well as clients of its Institutional Group, according to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Founded in 2002, the Business Bank operates from a single branch and has about $620 million in total assets as of March 31. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.
Bitwise Hires Commodity ETF Trailblazer
John Hyland
Bitwise Asset Management has hired United States Commodity Funds Chief Investment Officer John Hyland, an executive known for spearheading the launch of the first commodity-specific exchange traded funds. Hyland said in a statement he felt like he was “joining the crypto ETF ‘Dream Team’ at Bitwise.” The asset manager that currently offers a cryptocurrency index, also recently hired Matt Hougan, the former CEO of both ETF.com and Inside ETFs, and Teddy Fusaro, who helped build Direxion and IndexIQ.
Is Marine Finance the Next Asset Class?
Alternative investment platform YieldStreet is now offering Marine Finance investments to retail investors, which includes vessel acquisition, vessel construction and vessel deconstruction. So far, investors have committed $10 million towards the offering, the highest volume of investors in a single offering in YieldStreet’s history. The company says the investments are short in duration (from one to three years) and backed by assets—the ship, cash flows from ship leases or charters and scrap value of the ship.
