CEO ● EquiLend ● New York ●
In 1989, he joined securities lending trading in San Francisco and went on to be fixed-income product manager in the early ’90s. He then went from lending to running the cash-collateral reinvestment portfolios for BGI as cash strategist. “Some of the coolest trades I ever did were when I managed the cash desk,” he remembers. “We made money, and we mitigated risk.”
He then got involved in various strategic initiatives and technology projects, which led to his involvement in EquiLend as one of BGI’s representatives on the board of directors during the trading platform’s development and launch in the early 2000s. He went on to head derivatives services, but then returned to EquiLend as CEO in 2005.
So how do things compare now to the way it was then? “I had some very interesting experiences prior to this time-and those are the experiences you remember the most,” he says. “I remember when Drexel Burnham Lambert went out of business. I remember when Barings went out of business because of Nick Leeson, and I remember the Latin America debt crisis, the Russian default and the Malaysian banking crisis-I was front and center for that one. Y2K was interesting as well, but nothing compares to the last 18 months in terms of market disruption.”