Page 26 - BusinessWest January 6, 2025

Investing in the Future
St. Germain Marks a Century of Evolution
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
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To put 100 years in perspective, Tim Suffish considered his own time at St. Germain Investment Management.
“It’s crazy to think I’ve been with St. Germain now 20-plus years, so 100 is a lot in our industry. That predates Fidelity Investments and big firms like that. But 20 years here ... time flies,” said Suffish, senior vice president and head of equities at the firm.
But St. Germain has seen plenty of evolution, not only since it opened in 1924, but in the two decades Suffish has been on board.
“If you go back 50 years, firms like St. Germain tended to be brokers, and it was very transactional,” he told BusinessWest. “And portfolios were very different back then. St. Germain initially had a focus on bank and insurance stocks, seeing that we were just up the road from Hartford, Con- necticut, the insurance capital of the world. That transitioned to being investment managers, managing diversified portfolios for clients, blue-chip stocks based in the U.S., and that was the way we operated through the ’90s.
“But then, starting around the turn of the century in 2000, we in
the industry have moved more toward being wealth managers,” Suffish explained. “We call it total financial planning — your retirement assets or your brokerage assets or saving for some big event down the road, like your children’s college tuition or saving for a second home, or whatever it is.
We get more involved in all aspects of that, both the planning that goes in beforehand, setting expectations for what the returns might be, and the tim- ing to get to that goal.”
In putting the company’s longevity in historical perspective, St. Ger- main’s website notes it has survived 17 U.S. presidents, six U.S. wars, a global pandemic, and much more ... “and yet, we’ve stuck to one maxim
“If someone comes in to us at 60 years old and they’ve got a handful of years left until they’re retiring, it’s going to be a different conversation.”
TIM SUFFISH
across those years: do what’s in the best interest for our clients.”
“We have advisors that are salaried employees. We don’t sell commis- sioned products,” Suffish explained. “Our advisors can go into the typical
client meeting and give what we think is the right advice, and there’s no conflicts of interest where this thing over here is going to pay me more if I put them in it, versus something else. That’s something that differentiates us a little bit from some of the competition out there.”
Goals at Any Age
Suffish and the team at St. Germain — including President Mike Matty, who has served in that role for the past quarter-century — have stressed that financial planning and financial management are a process, whether an investor is 25 or 75.
Together, we’re building a brighter future.
Our commercial team is honored to help LightHouse Holyoke find its forever home.
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26 JANUARY 6, 2025 << BANKING & FINANCE >> BusinessWest