Financial Services

St. Louis is a national center of banking, finance, and insurance. 84,000 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 $44,000 regional average for all industries.

Investment and Securities Firms

Established decades ago as an important retail investment center, St. Louis is now home to a cluster of national investment firms including Edward Jones, Scottrade, Stifel Financial and Wells Fargo Advisors making it one of the largest concentrations of brokerage firms and talent outside of New York.

Founded in St. Louis in 1922, Edward Jones is a privately-held investment company that serves individual investors and small-business owners through over 10,500 branch offices throughout the United States. Edward Jones, which employs nearly 5,000 locally, recently added 225,000 square feet of space at its headquarters and 572,000 square feet in two other St. Louis area facilities.

Located in St. Louis since 1982, Scottrade has grown into a leading online brokerage firm. Scottrade currently employs over 3,500 around the country, including over 1,400 in St. Louis. In 2007, Scottrade built a new 34,000-square-foot data center and moved its headquarters to a new space in St. Louis County in 2010.

Stifel Financial Corp. is a full-service regional brokerage and investment banking firm, established in 1890 in St. Louis. The company provides securities brokerage, investment banking, trading, investment advisory, and related financial services through its wholly owned subsidiaries, primarily Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated, to individual investors, professional money managers, businesses, and municipalities.

Shortly after the Charlotte-based Wachovia Corporation acquired St. Louis-based A.G. Edwards and relocated its Wachovia Securities headquarters to St. Louis, Wachovia was acquired by San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Company. The combined Wachovia Securities and A.G. Edwards are now known as Wells Fargo Advisors. Wells Fargo Advisors is the nation’s third-largest brokerage business with over 15,000 financial advisors and nearly 4,000 licensed bankers in retail stores across the U.S. Since acquiring A.G. Edwards, Wells Fargo Advisors has added 600 employees at its St. Louis headquarters complex growing employment to 5,300 locally.

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 2010 it has invested approximately $24 million in 24 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, PNC, Regions Bank, Scottrade Bank, UMB Bank and U.S. Bancorp all have large operations in St. Louis. In June 2010, 145 different local, regional, and national banks had a total of $71.1 billion deposited in St. Louis area branches. The largest of the St. Louis-based banks, with overall deposits between approximate­ly $1 and $11 billion were First Bank, Scottrade Bank, Enterprise Bank & Trust, The Bank of Edwardsville, Stifel Bank and Trust, First National Bank of St. Louis, Pulaski Bank, and Reliance Bank. These and other banks headquartered in St. Louis had a total of $37.1 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.

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 4,000 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 relocated to a 110,000-square-foot office building in O'Fallon, Missouri in late 2009. Fireman's Fund Insurance, which is headquartered in San Francisco, has 370 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 500 healthcare enterprise, built a new 480,000-square-foot building in Clayton, Missouri. Called Centene Plaza, the company's headquarters occupies 189,000 square feet.

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 Cassidy Turley, CB Richard Ellis, Duke Realty, and Coldwell Banker, Gateway Commercial/Cushman & Wakefield Alliance, McEagle Properties 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, BKD, Brown Smith Wallace, LarsonAllen, UHY Advisors and RubinBrown LLP located in the region.