S.G. Warburg & Co

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S.G. Warburg & Co was a London-based investment bank founded in 1946 by Siegmund George Warburg, a member of the Warburg family, a prominent German-Jewish banking family; and Henry Grunfeld, a former industrialist in the German steel industry. Both Jews, Warburg and Grunfeld had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

S.G. Warburg and Co. was recognized for its pioneering mergers and takeover work in the UK in the 1960s, including the first ever hostile takeover in the UK and the first ever Eurobond issue. A significant event in the firm's rise to prominence was the acquisition of Seligman Bros. in 1957; through this, Warburgs gained a place on the Accepting Houses Committee comprised of the seventeen top merchant banks with access to cheap capital backed by the Bank of England.^[1] The bank gained clients and grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, its strong work ethic and rigorous intellectual culture standing in stark contrast to the gentlemanly and clubbable milieu of the traditional City houses.

A major participant in the "Big Bang" reforms of the 1980s, the bank became the preeminent UK-based M&A adviser, equity underwriter, research house and (via its Mercury Asset Management subsidiary) asset manager by the early 1990s, employing some 6,000 people worldwide.

Following a flawed and costly expansion into the US, in 1994 a merger was announced with Morgan Stanley, but the talks collapsed. The following year S.G. Warburg was purchased by Swiss Bank Corporation, and ultimately ended up part of UBS AG.

[edit] Bibliography

Jacques Attali, A Man of Influence: The Extraordinary Career of S.G. Warburg (trans. Barbara Ellis) (Adder & Adder, 1987)
Ron Chernow, The Warbugs (Random House, 1993)