Lee Kranefuss
| Lee Kranefuss | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Lee Thomas Kranefuss September 27, 1961 Endicott, NY |
| Education | BSEE, Cornell University (1984); MBA, Wharton (1991) |
| Home town | Endicott, NY |
| Board member of | Parker Center for Investment Research, ICI Board of Governors (former) |
Lee Thomas Kranefuss (born September 27, 1961) is an American businessman, investment manager, corporate adviser and entrepreneur.
Kranefuss started and ran the iShares series of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for Barclays Global Investors (BGI), the asset management arm of Britain’s Barclays Bank. BGI was acquired by BlackRock in December 2009. Kranefuss saw the opportunity to commercialize and grow the extant but immaterial ETF industry that had developed by the time iShares was launched in 2000, and is credited with driving ETFs from a novelty product to a mainstream investment choice through aggressive education and promotion of the iShares line. By the end of 2009, global ETF assets exceeded a trillion dollars globally, with nearly half the total in the iShares funds.
In 2012, Kranefuss associated with private equity firm Warburg Pincus, subsequently acquiring over 50% of Source ETFs, a leading European ETF provider.
In May 2016, Kranefuss and associates Vinay Nair (CEO and founder of Ada Investment Management) and Bruce Lavine (former head of iShares Europe and then COO and President of Wisdom Tree) announced the opening of 55 Capital Partners, a manager creating global multi-asset portfolios entirely with ETFs.
In 1997 Kranefuss joined Barclays Global Investors (BGI), the company that invented index funds. BGI was then the world’s largest manager of institutional assets. Kranefuss joined as Director of Strategy & Corporate Development. In that role Kranefuss conceived of the plan for the iShares business. Believing that an aggressive education and sales program would be needed to explain the benefits of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to investors, iShares was launched in 2000 with an intensive marketing effort behind the initial 40 new iShares funds to be launched in the U.S. — more than doubling the number of products then available in the market.
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