The investment firm, linked to the 200-year-old Stern family, has added a number of senior figures to its ranks.

J Stern & Co
Investment partnership J Stern & Co, with $1.9 billion in assets under management, has added to its client, sales and distribution team. It has appointed Som Bhattacharya, Thomas Steffen, and Steve Butler as senior client directors.

Bhattacharya (pictured below) has concentrated on emerging market debt throughout his 19-year career with Fidelity, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Asset Management and Bluebay. A chartered financial analyst, he holds a BTech and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Management respectively. He will be based in the firm’s London office.



Steffen has more than 35 years’ experience in the Swiss market, working with Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and a Swiss single-family office. He will be based in the firm’s Zürich office.


Thomas Steffen

Butler, who will be based in the New York office, is responsible for business development and client service in North America. He brings more than 30 years’ experience with institutional investors, having worked in sales, consultant relations, and client service roles at AllianceBernstein, Aravt Global, Artisan Partners, and First Eagle Investments (among others). He started his investment career in 1992 with Sanford C Bernstein & Co. Butler was awarded a BA in marketing from Santa Clara University.


Steve Butler

The business said that Steffen’s appointment in Switzerland follows the announcement made by sister company J Stern & Co (Switzerland) AG two months ago, confirming that the company had been granted an asset manager licence by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, FINMA.

History
The organisation oversees assets for the 200-year-old Stern dynasty, with 20 per cent of assets in the World Stars Global Equity strategy from the Stern family and its partners. It traces its origins to a wine merchant family which transformed its business into a bank in 1805 on the counsel of their neighbours, the Rothschild family, who had gone through that transition a few years earlier (coincidentally, the same year that Swiss private bank Pictet was founded). The family flourished, operating across Europe. During the Second World War, the French branch of the family represented by J Stern & Co fled to New York in 1940.  Whilst in New York, Maurice Stern created an investment strategy of long-term quality stock picking. In 1946, he returned to Paris to rebuild the banking business in Europe, including an asset management business. After being run for two generations, the business, called Banque Stern, was sold in 1988 to Swiss Bank Corporation (now known as UBS). The family created a family office in Geneva for the Stern family. J Stern & Co founded in London in 2012, builds on that legacy. Today, it has offices in London (2012), Zurich (2014), New York (2023) and Malta (2021).