Lee Thomas Kranefuss (born September 27, 1961) is an American businessman, investment manager, corporate adviser, and entrepreneur.
[2] The firm was successfully sold to Invesco in 2017[3] In 2016, Kranefuss and associates Vinay Nair and Bruce Lavine (former head of iShares Europe and then COO and President of Wisdom Tree) announced the formation of 55 Capital Partners.
His intent is to build a very intuitive and experiential tools for investment planning, leveraging current machine-learning, classification, and other techniques.
[8] In April 2009, it was reported that Barclays had signed a deal to sell iShares to the European private equity firm CVC Capital Partners for $4.4B.
[9] Kranefuss announced at the time he would be stepping away from daily management duties to assume the title of Vice Chairman of iShares, focusing on the transition process.
[10][11] However, during a go-shop period in the CVC contract, Barclays reportedly received significant interest to buy all of BGI – including iShares – by numerous parties.
[12] Subsequently, New York money manager BlackRock out-bid all others and purchased BGI,[13] closing the deal in late in the year.
The founding investment banks were reported to have remained as minority shareholder in Source, backing Kranefuss and Warburg Pincus.
The hired Bruce Lavine – a key early employee of iShares who went on to be President and COO of Wisdom Tree, a publicly listed ETF provider – as CEO of the new firm.