Ajay Pathak and Bill Reisner will co-lead a differentiated healthcare practice in Stifel's public finance group as managing directors based in St. Louis.
Pathak joins Stifel from Mercy, where he was chief strategic ventures officer for the St. Louis-based health system. Previously, he was president and CEO of OSF Saint Anthony's Health Center, having worked his way up from director of strategic business development.
He also worked in investment banking at Lehman Brothers and Barclays and as a senior consultant at Navigant Consulting.
After earning his BS/BA from Union College, Pathak earned his MBA from Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business and his MPH in public health management from Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Reisner was most recently co-head of fixed income at
Reisner was also previously head of public finance at Oppenheimer, vice president at Stern Brothers and a credit analyst and relationship manager at U.S. Bank.
He earned his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College and his EMBA from Washington University's Olin Business School.
"Stifel is a leader in many areas of the municipal market … and we are excited to be on this platform and leverage that strength to provide a vertical that is differentiated in the marketplace, where we work within the system and with our existing public finance bankers to expand the service offerings," Reisner said.
"We're very collaborative and we expect that collaboration will first and foremost present itself here, within Stifel, within the public finance department and across the entirety of the firm," Pathak said. "But there may be external organizations we're working with, as well, because some of these solutions that we'll be providing are really complex, and organizations are going through a lot of challenges."
Both bankers acknowledged significant headwinds in the healthcare space, with Reisner saying those headwinds will persist.
"If you look at the challenges that healthcare systems and hospitals are facing, and how that impacts operating performance and their clinical delivery, those challenges amount to real pressure on both their income statement and balance sheet, and those pressures ultimately have an impact on the financing they have in place," Pathak said, noting that in recent years, a number of hospitals and health systems saw the tripping of bond covenants, forbearance processes, defaults or other restructurings.
Those dynamics "are still pretty prevalent in the market," he added. "And what Stifel and Bill and I and the team here really hope to do is be able to help hospitals and health systems navigate those situations so that they continue to be aligned with their bondholders and they can deliver on their mission of providing care, or training those that provide care."
While they declined to comment on the overall direction of Stifel's public finance department, both bankers praised Stifel's commitment to the healthcare sector.
"That's obviously demonstrated by this advanced acceleration of bringing in leadership and talent and investing in this space," Pathak said.
"My leadership at Janney and Oppenheimer has placed me in situations where I've built teams, developed new expertise," Reisner said. "And that's what we're doing here. So when I was considering my next move, it was to align myself with Ajay and build out this new group at Stifel.
"For me, this checks a lot of boxes," he added. "This is the kind of work that I enjoy doing. We're going to be collaborating together, obviously, but also collaborating within the public finance department and really firm-wide."
This is not merely an opportunistic move for Stifel, Pathak said. "This has been a really well-thought-out investment and dedicated initiative by our CEO, Ron (Kruszewski), and the head of our municipal securities group, Peter (Czajkowski)," he said.
Stifel, which
