Ben Navarro

He is one of eight children of Frank Navarro, a college football coach who posed for the Norman Rockwell painting The Recruit.[2][3] He was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, when his father was football coach at Williams College.[4] He is of Italian descent through his father.[5]

He grew up in Westerly and Chariho, Rhode Island.[6] He lived in Princeton, New Jersey and graduated from Princeton High School, when his father was coaching the Princeton University football team.[4]

Navarro earned a bachelor's degree in finance from the University of Rhode Island.[1]

Navarro worked for Goldman Sachs for three years, before joining Citigroup in 1988, rising to vice president and co-head of mortgage sales and trading.[1]

He left Citigroup in 1997, and in 1998 founded Sherman Financial Group, a global diversified investment services company.[1] In 2005, Sherman bought a small bank and renamed it Credit One Bank.[7]

Credit One Bank, based in Las Vegas, Nevada, is a technology and data-driven financial services company focused on distressed or otherwise subprime borrowers. Credit One is one of the top 10 largest Visa credit card issuers in the United States with over 12 million cardholders across the country.[8] In 2018, Credit One was named the "Philanthropic Business of the Year - Private" by Vegas Inc. for its philanthropic efforts in Affordable Housing & Homelessness, Employment Services, and Financial Education.[9] J.D. Power's credit card satisfaction survey reported that Credit One received a customer satisfaction score of 74%.[10] While some reviewers have cited a lack of transparency, in 2022, The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, as a part of their Community Reinvestment Act evaluations of national banks, awarded Credit One the status of "outstanding", a score that was awarded to only three of the 29 banks evaluated.[11][12]

In 2021, Navarro founded Beemok Hospitality Collection, a hospitality company consisting of hotel, restaurant, and entertainment properties throughout the Southeast. The collection originated in October 2021 with the acquisition of their flagship property, the Charleston Place - the largest hotel in Charleston at 434 rooms.[13] Other notable properties in the collection include The Cooper, a 225-room luxury hotel being developed along downtown Charleston’s waterfront; The Riviera Theater, a registered historic landmark Art Deco theater in downtown Charleston; and Hotel Domestique, a luxury hotel in Traveler’s Rest, South Carolina.[13]

In 2022, Navarro bought the Western & Southern Open, a joint men's and women's tennis tournament on the ATP and WTA tour.[14]

Navarro has an estimated net worth of about $3 billion.[2][4]

Navarro owns the Live To Play Tennis Club in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, which has hosted three USTA national junior tennis championships, and six International Tennis Federation women's pro circuit tournaments.[15][16]

In 2018, he was a bidder for the Carolina Panthers NFL sports franchise. He ultimately lost to David Tepper.[2]

In September 2018, he bought Charleston Tennis LLC, owners of the Charleston Open women's tennis event, through his company Beemok Sports LLC.[15]

In 2022, Navarro funded extensive renovations to Credit One Stadium, a 20-year-old city-owned facility, as a gift to the City of Charleston.[17] The newly-renovated stadium debuted on April 2, 2022, for the 50th annual Credit One Charleston Open, the largest women's only tennis event in North America.[17]

Also in 2022, Navarro's Beemok Sports bought the rights to the Western & Southern Open. The event features men’s and women’s singles. In 2022, 19 of the top 20 players in the world competed in the Western & Southern Open, which is one of nine tennis events in the world designated as a top-tier tournament for both male and female players.[18]

He is married to Kelly Navarro, they have four children and live in Charleston, South Carolina.[2][15]

His daughters, Emma and Meggie Navarro, are involved in tennis. Emma is a collegiate tennis player at the University of Virginia. She has a career high WTA singles ranking of No. 53 achieved on July 24, 2023 and won the NCAA division 1 women's singles title on May 28, 2021 as a freshman.[19][20] Meggie is committed to play collegiately at UVA.[21]

Navarro's philanthropic ventures are focused on education and mental wellness. In 2008, he founded Meeting Street Schools, a South Carolina-based network of one private and three public elementary and middle schools serving an entirely under-resourced demographic.[5] Meeting Street Schools were founded upon the belief that all children deserve an excellent education regardless of their geographic or socioeconomic circumstances and now serve over 1,800 students.[22]

In December 2020, Navarro announced the Meeting Street Scholarship Fund wherein he pledged to supplement the cost of higher education for any Charleston County high school students who also qualified for the Pell grant and the State's LIFE scholarship, ensuring college opportunities for hundreds of South Carolina high school graduates each year.[23][24] Since inception, the Meeting Street Scholarship Fund has expanded to an additional 10 South Carolina counties and has awarded $20 million in scholarship dollars to over 500 students.[25] In 2023, the Meeting Street Scholarship Fund announced its aim to expand the initiative to all 46 South Carolina counties which would impact over 2,000 students and amount to $42 million in scholarship dollars.[25]

In 2020, Navarro, in partnership with the Medical University of South Carolina, founded Modern Minds, a new type of mental wellness center that uses holistic health strategies to help adults living with anxiety or depression.[26]