Blair Effron

Blair W. Effron is an American financier. Effron co-founded Centerview Partners, a boutique investment banking firm based in New York City. Centerview has offices in London, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Centerview Partners is a leading independent investment banking and advisory firm. The firm provides advice on mergers and acquisitions, financial restructurings, valuation, and capital structure to companies, institutions and governments.

Since the founding of Centerview in 2006, they have advised on more than $600 billion of transactions. Their clients include over 20% of the 50 largest companies in the world by market capitalization, and they have been involved in many of the largest and most complex corporate situations and transactions.

Effron is also active in Democratic Party politics and was a prominent supporter of John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign.

Effron grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, son of James W. Effron, president of Effron Oil. Effron graduated with a BA from Princeton University in 1984 and an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1986. He began his career at Dillon, Read & Co. and would remain with the firm and its successors (Warburg Dillon Read, UBS Warburg and UBS Investment Bank) over the next 20 years. Effron received a brief mention as an associate at Dillon Read in the Barbarians at the Gate involved in the buyout of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

Effron began his career in investment banking in the early 1980s and built up a reputation as one of the leading bankers in the consumer products industry and for past the ten years since founding Centerview has been one of the industry's top generalist banker across several industries. At UBS, Effron was Group Vice Chairman of UBS AG and a member of the Board of UBS Investment Bank, where he also sat on several management committees. Effron's major coup came in 2005 when he advised Gillette on its $57 billion sale to Procter & Gamble, which was the largest mergers and acquisitions transaction of 2005. Among Effron's other major deals are:

• The Hillshire Brands Company $8.55 billion sale to Tyson Foods.
• Kraft Foods Group, Inc. Exclusive financial advisor to Kraft $58 billion merger with Heinz
• H. J. Heinz Company's $28 billion sale to an investor consortium consisting of 3G Capital and Berkshire Hathaway
• General Electric's sale of $200B of financial assets. GE's $13.5 billion pending acquisition of Alstom. GE's $18 billion sale of remaining 49% interest in NBCUniversal to Comcast
• Lorillard's $27.4 billion sale to Reynold's American
• News Corporation's intention to pursue a separation of its publishing and media and entertainment businesses into two distinct publicly traded companies (eventually News Corp and 21st Century Fox)
• PepsiCo's $5.4 billion acquisition of Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods
• InBev's $52 billion acquisition of Anheuser-Busch
• Unilever's $24 billion acquisition of Bestfoods
• PepsiCo's $21 billion acquisition of The Pepsi Bottling Group and PepsiAmericas
• Diageo's $10 billion sale of Pillsbury to General Mills

and Diageo's $8 billion purchase of Seagram's wine and spirits business

• News Corporation's separation of company into 21st Century Fox and NewsCorp. NewsCorp's $6 billion acquisition of Dow Jones

In July 2006, Effron co-founded Centerview Partners along with Stephen Crawford, a former co-president of Morgan Stanley as well as Robert Pruzan, formerly CEO of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein North America.

Effron is Treasurer of Lincoln Center, and he also sits on the Boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, New Visions, Princeton University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is a member of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

Active in the democratic party, Effron hosted Obama to his Upper East Side Manhattan home in May 2014 and Hillary Clinton in June 2015.