Stuart Z. Goldstein, surely the highest profile corporate communications executive in the securities services industry, is stepping down.
The managing director of corporate communications and public affairs at the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has shaped the public image of the American central securities depository (CSD) and central counterparty clearing house (CCP) since the start of the 1990s. In a position where few survive more than 5 years and one CEO, Goldstein managed four times the average tenure, and served three successive CEOs. His last day with the organization is March 31.
Goldstein had an inimitable approach to public relations, and, not only because he was passionate about the organization he represented, he took unusual risks to get its messages across. He was also sufficiently enamored of the science of public relations to publish his ideas about how it could be revolutionized. Many of them are published on his personal Web site. He also opted to teach graduates on the subject of corporate communications at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
But at the heart of the Goldstein approach was a belief in the power of the written word. He ran something of a minor publishing operation at DTCC, whose 24 staff have turned out a stream of thought leadership essays, research papers and studies, and easily the most comprehensive and well-written press releases in the business. In the last year he published a pair of short guides to the clearing and settlement of securities – “The Guide to Clearance & Settlement” and “The Life Cycle of a Security” – which were models of clarity and concision. Even his e-mails to errant journalists were cleverly phrased.
Under his leadership, the annual report of the DTCC became a byword for lavish design, and regularly collected awards from industry judges. Goldstein also led a comprehensive redesign of the DTCC Web site, whose scope and content is astonishingly baroque for what remains an industry utility.
The Goldstein touch certainly raised the profile of the DTCC, in Europe as well as the United States. When the Depository Trust Company and the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) merged back in the 1990s Goldstein came, as he always liked to remind journalists, from the clearing side of the merger the securities market infrastructure did not feature outside a minority of the specialist financial press. As Goldstein steps down, he leaves a DTCC that has caught the attention even of Fox Business News and Rolling Stone. By its own estimation, the DTCC now crops up in an average of 13 news stories a day.
Goldstein entered the industry in 1991, when the NSCC hired him to create a corporate communications department from scratch. He had previously worked at American Express as director of corporate communications and at Citi as vice president and deputy director of national public affairs.
A politically committed citizen, Goldstein ran political campaigns in New Jersey, and has also served in the government of New Jersey as manager of legislative affairs for the public advocate and as a state ombudsman.
Although Goldstein is officially retiring, he is, by his own admission, not the retiring type. Friends say they will be extremely surprised if he does not find a new challenge on which to train his formidable skills.