Piper Jaffray Companies, an investment bank and institutional securities firm, announced the addition of its CD and Structured Note underwriting business with the arrival of Ardi Baniahmad, Josh Brenner, Rick Cabanes and Meghan Greenwood, formerly of First Empire. They will be based in the firm’s Los Angeles and New York offices.

“We are excited to welcome Ardi, Josh, Rick and Meghan to the firm. Collectively, the group has executed billions of dollars in structured transactions over the last 16 years,” said Jon Allen, head of fixed income trading and analytics at Piper Jaffray. “We are looking forward to marketing our own underwriting services to better serve our clientele.”

By growing the underwriting capabilities at Piper Jaffray, the group will build out a syndicate trading platform, focusing on underwriting structured payoffs in certificate of deposit and corporate note form. The team most recently came from First Empire/Stifel Financial. Prior to that, the group serviced domestic and international issuers and created products for private banks, broker-dealers, investment advisors and other institutions at Bank Hapoalim. The team was involved in similar lines of business at Countrywide Financial/Bank of America.

“This platform gives us tremendously more breadth to provide underwriting and structuring services to financial institutions as well as wider distribution of unique products to the dealer community, private banks and end accounts via Piper Jaffray’s sales-force. Piper Jaffray is a marquee platform that we think will leverage what we do, and certainly, we are looking forward to the opportunities with the addition of Sandler O’Neill,” said Rick Cabanes, fixed income trader and managing director at Piper Jaffray.