Early history In 1929, J.M. Dain founded J.M. Dain & Co., which would form the core of what would become Dain Rauscher Wessels, in Minneapolis. Dain had moved to Minneapolis in 1922 to represent a Chicago investment firm but by 1929 had decided to start his own firm. However, with the
stock market crash of 1929, Merrill Cohen took control of Dain & Co. in 1933 and helped steer it through the
Great Depression and into the 1940s. By the late 1950s, J.M. Dain had grown to 75 employees across eight offices. Wheelock Whitney was named the head of Dain in 1963 and steered the firm through aggressive growth in the 1960s leading to its initial public offering in 1972. In 1967, Dain merged with Kalman & Co. and then Quail & Co. creating Dain, Kalman & Quail, Inc. with 17 offices across the upper-midwestern U.S. It was also at this point that the
Rand Tower in Minneapolis was renamed the Dain Tower. Dain also acquired a number of regional brokerages including J. Cliff Rahal & Co. (1969), Platt, Tschudy & Co. (1970), Woodward-Elwood (1972) and Ralph W. Davis & Co. (1972). In 1972, Dain was listed on the
New York Stock Exchange. Rauscher was established in 1933 as a spinout from the Mercantile National Bank, based in Dallas. After the acquisition of Rauscher Pierce, the business continued to operate under its own brand until the mid-1990s.
Dain Rauscher Wessels and the acquisition by Royal Bank of Canada in 2000 In 1997, Dain Rauscher was formed from the merger of Dain Bosworth and Rauscher Pierce Refsnes Inc., both of which were owned by Interra Financial Inc. The combined firm had more than 1,200 brokers and institutional salespeople, focused primarily on the midwestern United States. In 1998 Dain Rauscher acquired the investment banking firm Wessels, Arnold & Henderson and restructured its Equity Capital Markets unit to become Dain Rauscher Wessels. In 2007, RBC Dain Rauscher acquired J. B. Hanauer, a brokerage firm founded in 1931. While the Dain Rauscher name was initially used in a number of RBC businesses after the acquisition, the brand was slowly phased out over time. In 2008, RBC changed the name to RBC Wealth Management. ==See also==