The Stern family returns to the Main after 86 years
It is a return to the roots: 86 years after the forced closure by the National Socialists and 220 years after the foundation of the traditional German-Jewish banking house Jacob S.H. Stern, the Stern family is returning to the Main with the asset management boutique J. Stern & Co. Ltd.. Andreas Krebs, long-standing Managing Director and partner of asset manager Mandarine Gestion and honorary treasurer of the citizens' association Demokratieort Paulskirche e.V., is appointed Managing Director of the German business.
Connected with Frankfurt
Managing Partner Jérôme Stern points out that there are still many reminders of the family history in the metropolis on the Main, „be it the Theodor Stern Quay or the Theodor Stern Foundation at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University“. With the establishment of the branch, the aim is to once again become a „trustworthy partner for investors in Germany“. The expansion of the customer service and sales team „builds on the 220-year banking tradition of my family“.
Once a large private bank
J. Stern & Co. was founded in 2012 by Jérôme Stern and Chief Investment Officer Christopher Rossbach as a spin-off from the Stern family office. It is an investment boutique organised as a partnership with headquarters in London and branches in New York, Zurich and Malta. It specialises in investments in global equities, emerging market corporate debt and multi-asset solutions. Jérôme Stern comes from the Parisian line of the Sterns and their bank, which was sold to a predecessor of UBS. Assets under management currently total 2.5 billion euros. Clients are family offices, foundations, institutional investors such as pension funds, but also banks with their wealth management clients.
Early expansion abroad
Even though it is less well-known than the Rothschild and Goldschmidt banks, which were also founded in Frankfurt, Bankhaus Jacob S.H. Stern, founded in 1805, was one of the largest private banks in Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Like the Rothschilds, the Sterns also expanded abroad early on, to Paris and London.
The bank, which grew out of a wine house founded at the end of the 18th century and gradually began to offer financial services, participated in the issue of many national and international government bonds in the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example for Portugal, Argentina, the Ottoman Empire and China. It was involved in the extensive bond issue to finance French war reparations to the German Empire after the war of 1870/71. The specialist in securities issues also financed a huge infrastructure project in Portugal following a devastating earthquake. In addition, the bank was involved in the founding of companies such as Metallgesellschaft and various railway companies.
Bankhaus Jacob S.H. Stern had a seat on the highest administrative and supervisory body of the Reichsbank, the „Central Committee“, and was a partner of Deutsche Bank in its foreign expansion. With their return to the Main, the Stern family in a way re-established a bond that had been violently torn apart in 1939.
