Investment company Edward Jones is planning to lay off a number of local employees as it restructures.
“The size of our home office will be reduced,” said company spokesperson Catherine Stengel.
As of 2024, the firm had 5,476 local workers.
The initiative, which she would not detail, will “strengthen our collaborative, client-first mindset and alignment with our firm goals,” she said.
“This multi-year initiative will help the firm deliver exceptional experiences to our clients, colleagues and communities, and ensure we continue to attract and retain talent as an employer of choice for financial advisors and home office associates,” she said in a statement.
Edward Jones did not provide the number of workers who will be affected, their job categories or a timeline of when the cuts will take place.
Edward Jones’ corporate office is in Des Peres at 12555 Manchester Road. It also has a north campus location in Maryland Heights. It has more than 15,000 branch office locations in the United States and Canada.
Last year, Edward Jones was named one of Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For.
Edward Jones had more than 20,000 financial advisers in more than 16,000 North American branches in 2024, with more than 9 million clients across the U.S. and Canada, according to a January filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It has $2.2 trillion in assets under care.
Edward Jones opened as Edward D. Jones & Co. in 1922 in downtown St. Louis, as a “single room furnished with a desk, three chairs and a hat rack,” according to the company’s web site.
It “is on every town square in America,” said managing partner Penny Pennington in a February 2024 interview with Post-Dispatch publisher Ian Caso.
In that interview Pennington said the firm had recently created an “artificial intelligence center of excellence” to explore how the generative AI could help detect fraud, training and “help the effectiveness and efficiency of our financial advisers and branch teams,” who work with 200 to 800 clients a year.
In 2020 Edward Jones submitted an application to charter an affiliated bank, to operate alongside its asset management business. It withdrew the application two years later.
The company in 2021 was among 11 major employers that formed the St. Louis Anchor Action Network, pledging to hire more people of color from high-poverty areas of St. Louis and St. Louis County.
