The 2015 Fintech Finance 35: Jane Gladstone, Evercore Partners

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< The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

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Jane Gladstone
Head, Financial Services Corporate Advisory Practice
Evercore Partners

With postcrisis reforms and other market uncertainties clouding the financial industry’s profitability outlook, buyers and sellers of fintech companies are ever more inclined to seek out boutique investment banks for the attentiveness and niche-market expertise that they cultivate, Jane Gladstone says. Since leaving Morgan Stanley to join Evercore Partners in 2005 — ten years after former U.S. Treasury official and Blackstone Group vice chairman Roger Altman founded the New York–based firm — Gladstone has been one of the premier boutique bankers in financial technology. As head of the financial services corporate advisory practice, she has put Evercore on the map with marquee deals like high frequency trading firm Virtu Financial’s $314 million IPO in April. That was but the latest lucrative win in a sector that Gladstone, who turns 47 in November, helped to shape. Another was the $29 billion sale of First Data Corp. to KKR & Co. in 2007. When Gladstone started her 12-year stint with Morgan Stanley, she says, “there wasn’t such a thing as fintech, but it was clear to me in the late ’90s that technology was going to utterly transform financial services.” In 1995 she became an associate, advising on M&A and IPOs, and was covering such now-big names as CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange before others paid much attention to them. Opting out of the MBA track, Gladstone brought to finance a bachelor’s in art history from the University of Virginia, initially taking a job with private equity firm Hambro Magan in London. “I didn’t see much of a leap from auctioning paintings to auctioning companies,” she says.

The 2015 Fintech Finance 35