Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette or DLJ is a defunct U.S. investment bank founded by William H. Donaldson, Richard Jenrette and Dan Lufkin in 1959. Its businesses included securities underwriting; sales and trading; investment and merchant banking; financial advisory services; investment research; venture capital; correspondent brokerage services; online, interactive brokerage services; and asset management.
In August 2000, DLJ (which was majority owned by AXA Financial) announced that it was being bought by Credit Suisse. The firm was headquartered at 277 Park Avenue in New York City and employed 11,300 people as of July 2000.
History
Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette founded the firm on the principle that no one else on Wall Street was doing high quality independent corporate research. They not only centered the firm around this notion but ended up being one of the best ever. As research became more of a commodity throughout the 1980s and 1990s they had since expanded into other businesses. One of them was a dominance in high yield fixed income securities. They gained this dominance in both underwriting and trading by astutely picking up most of the expertise from Drexel Burnham Lambert after its demise in the late 1980s.
DLJ's online brokerage business was first called the Personal Computer Financial Network (PCFN). It was later renamed DLJDirect in 1997. DLJDirect, was spun off from DLJ in 1999. Following DLJ's acquisition by Credit Suisse, DLJDirect was renamed CSFBDirect. CSFBDirect was renamed HarrisDirect after being sold to the Bank of Montreal in 2002 and was eventually re-sold to E-Trade in early 2006. The Pershing Division of DLJ (Harris) remained until being sold to the Bank of New York in 2003.
Credit Suisse's acquisition of DLJ closed in November 2000 with a purchase price of approximately $11.5 billion. Credit Suisse still uses the DLJ brand for its private equity operations, such as DLJ Merchant Banking Partners, DLJ Investment Partners & DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners entities.
Notable alumni
Safra A. Catz — President of Oracle Corporation.
Joel Cohen — Co-Founder of Sagent Advisors.
Susan Decker — Former president of Yahoo! Inc.
William H. Donaldson — Former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Rich Riley, Senior Vice President & Managing Director of Yahoo! EMEA
Bennett Goodman — Founder of hedge fund GSO Capital Partners.
Henry Jackson — Founder of OpCapita.
Hamilton James — President and COO of The Blackstone Group.
Douglas Kahn — Former President and CEO of Croscill Home Fashions
Ken Moelis — Former UBS Investment Bank executive and founder of Moelis & Co.
Herald Ritch — Co-Founder of Sagent Advisors.
Daniel Scotto — Former Director of Research at Bear Stearns, DLJ, Rothschild, and S&P, Institutional Investor ranked First Team Nine Years in a row and the Top U.S. Bond Analyst while at Bear Stearns, Financial Analyst, President & CIO of Whitehall Financial Advisors LLC.
Wayne Van Dyck — Founder & CEO of Six Degrees Media, Inc., the creators of Smart Money Websites.
Mary DeLuca - Founder & President of Preferred Resume Group, LLC
Scott Aschoff - Chief Operations Officer Janney Montgomery Scott LLC
Alain O'Hayon - Managing Executive Partner, Dominick & Dominick LLC
Franck Ceddaha - Managing Partner at Oddo Corporate Finance in Paris
David Einhorn - Founder and President of Greenlight Capital
Alan Richman - Founder and President of InnoVative Capital LLC
George Ball - Founder and Chairman of Philpott Ball & Werner, Inc.
Michael J. Campbell - CEO and President Dominick & Dominick LLC,
James Neissa - Co-Head Investment Bank (UBS)
Jamie Dinan - Founder and Chairman of York Capital Management, LP.