Corporate partnerships: Raymond James
Raymond James is consistently represented at the University of Florida, especially on the Warrington College of Business campus.
The company is largely involved with Warrington’s Finance Professional Development Program. Raymond James is a program sponsor and annually hosts students from the program at its St. Petersburg, Fla. headquarters. They also are involved in classroom speaking engagement and student groups in the program’s tracks for asset management, corporate banking, fixed income, investment banking and wealth management.
Read more about impactful Warrington alumni who are making a difference at Raymond James.
After 17 years at Bank of America, Steve Raney saw a chance to stay in his hometown of Tampa and avoid the move out of state that would likely come with his next promotion. Raney was considering an offer to join the Raymond James C-suite in 2005 and was intrigued by the chance to help grow what was a smaller bank.
At $1.5 billion in assets when Raney accepted his first role with Raymond James, today it holds more than $63 billion in assets while Raney serves as Executive Chairman 20 years later.
In his role, Raney works through many diverse responsibilities as one of 13 members on the Raymond James executive leadership team.
“I’m focused on setting strategy for the firm,” Raney said. “I spend time on regulatory oversight matters with our two banks and trust company. Credit and risk management is also an important part. I’m involved in lending decisions and risk management practices. I also have talent management responsibilities, making sure we have the right people in the right seats to beat our business objectives.”
Raney got his first job out of college as a credit analyst with Bank of America thanks to the UF Career Expo held at the O’Connell Center, a long running event that is now known as Career Showcase but still held in the same iconic UF location.
The Bank of America team trained him for a year, leading to his next role as a commercial banker. He then became the leader of a small team within the bank, which got him thinking about how he could expand his education and leadership skills. The answer to doing so was to earn his Executive MBA at UF.
What he learned in the MBA program back in 1999 is still relevant to what Raney does every day.
“Quite a bit of the curriculum was useful from a technical standpoint,” Raney said. ”The corporate finance, understanding balance sheets and income statements – that’s important in a business loan. There was also a significant amount of networking and a lot of group projects that wound up teaching collaboration and how to see who has what strengths in what areas during team projects. I still use that now in our business – working in a group setting to figure out who has strengths in what areas.
“The technical skills were helpful, but the groupwork and collaboration was a very important element.”
Raney is Raymond James’ executive sponsor for recruiting at the University of Florida. He works with their recruiting team and is heavily involved in recruiting efforts at the Warrington College of Business. He returns to campus to speak with students at recruiting events and in classes.
“I enjoy recruiting because UF has the most alumni at Raymond James, more than any school within our company,” Raney said. “It’s a very important pipeline for us and having relationships with students early is important to having them choose to work with us. We’ve had tremendous results from UF graduates joining us and many of them move quickly into leadership roles.
“It has worked well for us and them. They come here with great leadership and technical skills. It’s a strong partnership. There’s a strong sense of camaraderie with UF grads here. It’s definitely unique.”
During his time as a student at the University of Florida, O’Connor learned lessons that would prepare him for his career when he was in the classroom – and on the basketball court.
He came to UF as a walk-on for legendary head coach Billy Donovan, and even though he wasn’t the star player on the team, he learned lessons that directly translate to his current role as Chief Operating Officer at Raymond James & Associates.
“You have to know your role on the team,” O’Connor said. “I noticed I could play a role for the team without being on the court and provide positive contributions to our team’s culture in the locker room. That translated to my leadership role now. Our financial advisors are the stars, and I can play that same role in supporting them as a team member in delivering and strengthening our culture.”
Those lessons impact every day of O’Connor’s responsibilities. He supports the business of financial advisors across Raymond James’ offices around the United States. They currently have more than 8,000 financial advisors and manage more than $1.5 trillion in assets.
O’Connor worked his way up to the COO role at Raymond James over the course of his 23-year career. But it all started with a chance meeting at a career fair. In 2001, O’Connor handed his resume to a man at the Raymond James booth at a career fair in the bottom of The Swamp. O’Connor dropped the resume and kept walking to explore the rest of the fair, but the Raymond James employee chased him down and went the extra mile to make sure O’Connor would prioritize Raymond James.
He started with the company in 2001 in a new business unit, the alternate investments group. He focused on private wealth and serving ultra-high net worth clients early in his career. O’Connor later became the head of wealth planning and advice before pivoting to leadership with advisors in the field. He was the regional director in Florida then a divisional director for central division before accepting his role as COO in October 2024.
“Coming up on 24 years of tenure, it has been an incredible experience on this path,” O’Connor said.
O’Connor continues to return to campus for career fairs or speaking to students. He also plays an important role in hosting Warrington students who visit the Raymond James campus in St. Petersburg. The more he interacts with UF students during the recruiting process and after they’re hired, the more impressed he is with their preparedness.
“The education they receive is incredibly impressive,” O’Connor said. “It’s fun to take a vested interest in their careers and see them grow. We have a lot of Gator alumni in the St. Pete headquarters and an active Gator network here from senior executives to first-year associates. Not a day goes by where I’m not working with other UF alumni.”
In a Hough Hall classroom back in 2018, Brent Penter first learned about Raymond James and the company’s equity research team. He spoke with the Raymond James employees after the presentation, signed up for their summer immersion program and received an offer to return the following summer for his junior internship where he earned a full-time job offer.
Now an associate analyst with the company, it’s Penter who often returns to Hough Hall to give those same presentations about the equity research team.
“It’s not lost on me that it’s an uncommon way for this to go,” Penter said. “It’s hard for students sitting in those seats to imagine, but not that long ago, I was sitting in their seat and listening to presentations.”
After earning a full-time offer during his junior internship with Raymond James, Penter has moved from research associate to senior research associate to his current role of associate analyst.
All of his time with the company has been spent on the equity research team. He covers the telecommunications and media space, where he researches, builds financial models and creates estimates for large companies like T-Mobile, Disney, Paramount and many others. From there, they talk to professional money managers and help them make decisions on which stocks they should invest in from the telecommunications and media industry.
“Our job is to be subject matter experts on the industry and companies we cover,” Penter said.
Many of the responsibilities Penter carries in his daily routine were created as a student in the Master of Science in Finance program at Warrington.
“People always say the classes you take in college don’t prepare you for your career. There will always be a lot you learn in the job, but the MSF program was very applicable to what I do on a day-to-day basis and did prepare me well for what I do every day,” Penter said. “We’re building financial models – I did that in the MSF program. We’re doing valuation analysis – I did that in the MSF program. There was a class for everything in the program.”
Penter is constantly reminded of his Gator roots with the company. His boss, who has been at Raymond James for 29 years, graduated from UF, along with Raymond James’ Director of Equity Research and many others around the company.
“The connection between UF and Raymond James, as a Florida based company, it’s very strong,” Penter said. “We like it that way. We joke that we like to have as many Gators as we can.”
With the goal of opening her own public relations firm, York Adrien decided to pair her public relations undergraduate degree with a master’s in management from Warrington. She planned for the master’s degree to give her the business background necessary to run her own business. Instead, it sparked a new passion for finance.
“I fell in love with finance class and I got the bug for it,” she said. “It was definitely a potential interest for me in the future.”
York Adrien started her career in marketing at a local credit union and part of her responsibilities were focused on making financial literacy fun. She went to their collegiate partners and did workshops with students about financial literacy, which included building a financial food truck that provided quick tips for students on campus. The one-on-one interaction was her favorite part of the job, and it turned into telling her boss that she wished there was an opportunity for her to provide financial guidance full time.
There was. York Adrien transferred within the company to work with two of their financial advisors, and after getting licensed and spending two years in the department, she was ready to become an advisor. Raymond James’ training program was immediately attractive to her and was a natural fit.
“Transitioning from the credit union here, it was seamless,” York Adrien said. “It’s a lot of the same philosophies. We always said members were first at the credit union, and the client is always first here. We’re a large firm but it feels small and intimate, which helps clients get great service.”
Much of York Adrien’s day is spent focusing on her clients. If she’s working in the morning to make trades and create distributions for one client, she could spend the afternoon meeting with potential new clients who need financial guidance. She also serves on the company’s NextGen Tech Council, where she pilots new technology within the organization, and sits on the Women’s Advisory Council, where she’s able to mentor younger advisors and plan for upcoming symposiums.
She has also played an important role in reshaping the firm’s headquarters. She was involved in conversations about reworking employee spaces and optimizing them for efficiency and comfort when employees returned to the office after the pandemic.
“The firm does a great job of listening to associates and delivering as best as possible,” she said.
