Duff & Phelps

Duff & Phelps Corporation

Type	Private
Industry	Financial services
Founded	1932
Headquarters	55 East 52nd Street New York, New York, United States
Key people	Philip Duffy (Managing Director)
Products	Valuation Mergers and Acquisitions Dispute Consulting Restructuring Alternative Asset Advisory Tax Services Transaction Opinions Legal Management Consulting
Owner	The Carlyle Group, Stone Point Capital LLC, Pictet & Cie and Edmond de Rothschild Group
Number of employees	2,000
Website	www.duffandphelps.com

Duff & Phelps Corporation is a global valuation and corporate finance advisor with expertise in complex valuation, dispute and legal management consulting, mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, and compliance and regulatory consulting. The firm’s more than 2,000 employees serve a diverse range of clients from offices around the world.

The firm has dedicated industry practices focusing on consumer and retail, energy and mining, financial services and asset management, healthcare and life sciences, industrials, media and entertainment, real estate and technology and telecom. Clients include publicly traded and privately held companies, law firms, government entities and investment organizations such as private equity firms and hedge funds.

Duff & Phelps was founded in 1932 to provide investment research. Since that time, the firm expanded into corporate finance and investment management as well as credit rating. In 1979, Duff & Phelps expanded into investment management (creating what would become Duff & Phelps Investment Management Co. (DPIMC), which was spun off into its own company in 2009 and is no longer a part of the Duff & Phelps Corporation).

In 1984, the company was nearly acquired by Security Pacific Corp. in a $35 million transaction. However, the deal was called off in early 1985 Security Pacific Corp. because of restraints put on the deal by the Federal Reserve Board, which would have precluded the company from issuing public credit ratings.

The company was acquired five years later, in 1989, in a $146 million management buyout. The buyout was backed by Freeman, Spogli & Co., a private equity firm, which controlled approximately two-thirds of the company, and management and employees owning the remaining third of the company's equity. The transaction was highly leveraged, financed with 79% bank borrowings and 15% coupon high-yield bonds. The company was taken public for the first time in 1992 through an initial public offering of stock on the .