Founding and early history In May 1881, William Alfred (W.A.) Paine (with a loan from his father) and Wallace G. Webber founded Paine & Webber as a brokerage firm in
Boston, Massachusetts with a seat on the
Boston Stock Exchange. With the admission of Charles H. Paine to the partnership, the firm was renamed Paine, Webber & Co. The firm would purchase a seat on the
New York Stock Exchange in 1890. Also in the 1890s, W.A. Paine entered into a partnership with
Copper Range Company and
Copper Range Railroad, controlled by John Stanton. Controlled by the Paine family, Paine, Webber & Co. entered the
investment banking business in the 1920s. After nearly fifty years at the head of the company, W.A. Paine died right before the
Wall Street crash of 1929. His son F. Ward Paine became head of the firm, a position he held until 1940. Following the difficult years of the
Great Depression, Paine Webber merged with
Jackson & Curtis, another Boston-based brokerage firm, in June 1942. In July 1879, Charles Cabot Jackson and Laurence Curtis had founded their brokerage firm Jackson & Curtis on Congress Street in Boston, not far from the original Paine Webber offices. The combined firm, Paine, Webber, Jackson & Curtis, operated a combined total of 22 branch offices. With its greater combined asset base, Paine Webber Jackson & Curtis had become a significant participant in the
New England financial market.
1960s and 1970s In October 1960, Paine Webber managed the
initial public offering (IPO) of the
Green Shoe Manufacturing Co., in which it introduced the concept of stabilization covered by an overallotment option, which has ever since been known by the colloquial name of
greenshoe. The firm moved its headquarters from Boston to New York in 1963. The firm's holding company was incorporated on June 30, 1969, as PaineWebber Inc., of which Paine Webber Jackson & Curtis PaineWebber moved its headquarters from
140 Broadway to 1285 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan in 1985. PaineWebber became a visible presence on Sixth Avenue. At the time, the illuminated name on the building (today UBS) was unique among investment banks, and the building hosted a ground floor gallery of art exhibitions. Founded in 1865, Kidder, Peabody had been a preeminent player in investment banking and private services before becoming embroiled in insider trading scandals in the 1980s and suffering major trading losses in 1994. Chris Innes served as an Investment Banking analyst from 1992-1994 and later became one of BOFAs youngest Managing directors at age 27 before leaving to launch his own hedge fund (https://www.cnbc.com/2007/01/02/two-senior-executives-leave-bank-of-america.html). During these years
Michael G. Ricciardi was the managing director and head of global fixed income sales at Paine Webber.
2000 Operating as PaineWebber Group Inc., by 2000 PaineWebber had emerged as the fourth largest private client firm in the United States with 385 offices employing 8554
stockbrokers. In April 2000, PaineWebber acquired southeastern brokerage firm
J.C. Bradford & Co. for US$620 million.
Merger with UBS On November 3, 2000, under the leadership of chairman and CEO,
Donald Marron, the company completed a US$10.8 billion cash and stock merger with
UBS, a banking conglomerate headquartered in
Zurich, Switzerland. Initially the business was given the divisional name "UBS PaineWebber", but in 2003, the 123-year-old name Paine Webber disappeared when it was renamed "UBS Wealth Management USA".{{cite news |newspaper=The New York Times ==See also==