Financial firm AllianceBernstein Holding LP announced Wednesday it will move its global headquarters from New York to Tennessee, bringing 1,050 jobs and an investment of more than $70 million to the booming Southern city of Nashville.
Gov. Bill Haslam deemed Wednesday's announcement a win for Tennessee, which is drawing in a company that manages about $549 billion in assets and has been stationed in the country's main financial hub for five decades.
"This is a new step, I think, in Nashville's maturation as a global center for business," Haslam told reporters after a news conference Wednesday.
AllianceBernstein has about 3,500 employees and offices in more than 22 countries. The workers coming to Nashville make between $150,000 and $200,000 on average, and local hires are also expected, AllianceBernstein Chief Operating Officer James Gingrich said.
A small group of employees will move to Nashville this summer; more will come in 2019. A new building in Nashville's central business district should be finished before the end of 2020, and the full transition should be done by the end of 2022, Gingrich said.
Company President and CEO Seth Bernstein said AllianceBernstein considered a list of 30 cities but called Tennessee's capital the "clear winner" by every metric the company analyzed: housing, education, social amenities, weather, cost of living, business friendliness, ability to source the country's top talent, diversity and inclusion, among others.
"Moving our corporate headquarters here allows us to offer advantages to our employees that we just simply couldn't in the New York metropolitan area," Bernstein said at the news conference. "A more affordable cost of living with lower taxes and housing costs, a high quality of life, including much shorter commuting times for many of our people, and a brand new, state-of-the-art work environment with all the best technology and tools."
The Nashville headquarters will include finance, information technology, operations, legal, compliance, internal audit, human resources, sales and marketing. Additionally, Bernstein assured that the company will always maintain a presence in New York.
Haslam said he does not yet have the final dollar amount of the company's economic incentives package.