Don Rice, the chairman and CEO of Rice Financial Products Co., originally saw his future heading into a career in engineering before he changed course and started his own derivatives boutique in the early 1990s.
“It’s not nearly as significant a change as one might think,” Rice said. “Engineering is a quantitative business. For the most part, you’re doing projects or navigating processes to build something. It involves teams of people and is technical in nature. Muni investment banking has dollar signs by the numbers, but the two disciplines tend to be very similar.”
Rice grew up in a small town in Arkansas and received his engineering degree with honors from Kettering University. He also graduated with a Master of Business Administration with distinction from Harvard Business School and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Arkansas for his work in investment banking.
He began his career in investment banking at Merrill Lynch by applying innovative derivative concepts to municipal markets. He began making friends and influencing people almost immediately.
“I have followed Don’s career since 1985 when we first met as industry associates, he at Merrill Lynch and me at Smith Barney,” said Curtis Harris, who is now the managing director at Rice Financial Products Co. “He immediately set the standard by being part of the team that developed the original municipal swap.”
While working for Merrill Lynch, Rice also quarterbacked a large, complex swap-based refunding of 200 separate municipal loans for the District of Columbia, which was an Institutional Investor Deal of the Year.
In the wake of the financial crisis, Rice shifted the firm’s business model to focus on bond underwriting, bringing many existing swap clients into the business.
He then successfully launched several additional businesses, each one narrowly focused on the core principle of achieving a comparative advantage based on technical and analytical talent rather than firm scale.
Today, Rice Financial participates in more than 10% of all municipal bond financings completed in the United States each year, and the firm’s institutional fixed income trading desk averages $15 billion of fixed income sales annually. For Rice, there’s more to the business than the numbers.
“Investment banking has a variety of personalities working in it, depending on where you are,” he said. “The M&A business, the trading business, private equity — all of those things fall into investment banking — but public finance is the one area where you’re doing things that help provide for the public good.”
Rice’s efforts to promote diversity and inclusion across the municipal finance industry are also noteworthy.
Since founding the firm 30 years ago, Rice has worked to increase the participation of Minority and Women Owned Business Enterprises in the municipal marketplace. He and his team routinely educate issuers on the merits of syndicate structures and policies that improve opportunities for MWBE firms.
“I have had the pleasure of working alongside Don for many years now, and his dedication to fostering professional growth and diversity at the firm is one of the attributes I most admire in him,” said Lisa-Sheri Torrence, general counsel and chief administrative officer, Rice Financial Products Company.
“Don personally approves every hire at the firm through the lens of increasing the firm’s already outstanding record of diversity. This focus has had a life-changing impact for many young professionals.”
Rice Financial is one of the largest financiers for Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the country, executing loans through a federal program. Rice has closed more than 70 loans totaling $3 billion for both public and private HBCU institutions.
The program provides assistance through the issuance of federal guarantees on the full payment of principal and interest on qualified bonds, the proceeds of which are used for loans.
Rice is still moving forward after 30 strong years and is now in a position to offer sage advice to the next generation of muni leaders.
“I would say to young people, this is a technical and analytical business that rewards understanding and creative thinking,” he said. “But remember, while numbers are our business, the numbers help people, so people are our business too.”
When Rice is not busy steering his company to greater heights of success, he enjoys flying himself on business trips, including several solo runs across the country.