1st & Main Growth Partners

1st & Main Growth Partners

Charles J. Moore founded 1st & Main Growth Partners in Chicago after two distinct early chapters: co-managing Northern Trust's Special Equity Fund, which handled venture capital, mezzanine finance, and small emerging growth companies, followed by nearly a decade of trading options and equities as a floor partner at the American Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board Options Exchange. The firm now operates from a single office at 150 S. Wacker Drive. 1st & Main invests across two parallel sleeves. The Banc Funds sleeve provides capital to small, subregional financial institutions aiming to absorb new technology and expand. The Fintech Funds sleeve, supported by what the firm describes as a longstanding research effort, is deploying into financial software, payments, core systems, online lending, artificial intelligence, and blockchain. One confirmed portfolio company is Abington Bank, a Massachusetts savings bank that received a 1st & Main investment in 1997 and was later acquired by Hometown Financial Group in 2019. Moore serves as the firm's sole named principal, managing existing funds and general administration while supplying strategic support to portfolio companies. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, an MA from Oxford, and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. The firm's public footprint remains thin; a single portfolio company is disclosed, and no updated deployment totals, professional headcount, or recent vehicle closings are available. 1st & Main's structural differentiator is an operator-centric, single-CIO architecture that pairs an exclusively small-bank buyout practice with an in-house thematic bet on fintech spanning AI and blockchain. This is not a multi-manager platform or a fund-of-funds — it is a tightly held shop where a former trader and private equity manager personally backs community banks while researching and underwriting the tools that could reshape their economics.