Firm Overview

Businesses Built on Technology

Rice Financial focuses on building successful niche businesses centered around pockets of technical expertise. Rather than trying to do it all, this strategic approach allows our team to deliver the highest level of service in key market segments. We provide investment banking services to financial institutions, state and local governments, corporations and educational institutions, offering premier execution and creative financial solutions in four areas:

Rice Execution Services

Cost‐efficient equity and options execution.

Municipal Investment Banking

Primary market bond underwriting and secondary market sales of short duration securities to state and local governments.

Corporate Investment Banking

Primary market underwriting of corporate bonds and IPO participation.

Higher Education Finance

Direct lending to public and private colleges and universities in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education.

Our Path to Today

From the beginning, Rice Financial has been a firm with a technical focus. Founder Don Rice, an engineer by training who later received an MBA from Harvard Business School, began his career in investment banking at Merrill Lynch applying derivative concepts for the first time to the municipal markets. In the early 1990s, Don left Merrill to form Rice Financial Products Company as a derivatives boutique, and the new firm quickly became recognized among the most technically innovative companies in municipal finance, executing derivative transactions totaling nearly $30 billion in aggregate notional amount, none of which ever resulted in an unfavorable outcome for the client.

In the wake of the financial crisis, Rice Financial shifted its business model to focus on bond underwriting, bringing many existing swap clients into the business, then successfully launched several additional businesses, each one narrowly focused around the core principle of achieving a comparative advantage based on technical and analytical talent rather than simply firm scale.

This approach to growth has served Rice Financial, and our clients, well. Today, 30 years since our founding, Rice Financial is a participant in more than 10% of all infrastructure bond financings completed in the United States. Our institutional fixed income trading desk averages $20 billion in fixed income sales annually. Our service as a direct lender to colleges and universities has extended to more than 50 schools, with many loans exceeding $100 million. Our institutional equity execution business provides institutional firms with electronic execution of equities and equity derivatives on one of the most advanced technological trading platforms available, trading millions of equity shares and equity derivatives every day.