Intrepid Woman: Betty Ross, Financial Advisor, Sapient Financial Group

BettyRossBy Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

After speaking to Betty Ross, you realize the power that comes with being honest and straightforward and that sometimes, a frank approach is the best approach. So let’s begin: What are the chances that a young black girl growing up in the segregated South during some of the region’s most tumultuous times would persevere and make a grand life for herself after growing up in low-income housing to parents with eighth grade educations? Are her chances even further diminished when she becomes the woman of the house after her mother passed away when she’s just thirteen, baring her with the full brunt of domestic responsibilities for her father and four siblings? What are her chances when she becomes a teenage bride and mother for the first time at eighteen, and a divorced mother of two at twenty?

For Betty Ross, a seventy-year-old financial advisor currently with Sapient Financial Group, who grew up in an area where high school was the height of education, succeeding and going beyond what was expected of her was never a choice, but rather the only option – no matter how long it took.

In 1971, Ross left San Antonio, Texas – where she was born and raised and currently lives today – just seven years after the city had officially been integrated, though it was still experiencing a great deal of racial unrest. “I decided that being in Texas wasn’t good for me or my sons; it held too many painful memories and the city was slow to progress,” Ross said. “I wanted to provide my sons with a different outlook on life.” If you’ve encountered Ross – even for a moment – you’ll understand that her sons would have turned out just fine without the change of location because her strong spirit, fearlessness, and tenacity are enough to facilitate any change necessary.

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Voice of Experience: Heike Eckert, Executive Director, Eurex

Image via MarketsWiki

Image via MarketsWiki

By Jessica Titlebaum (Chicago)

In the mid 1990s, Heike Eckert launched DTB’s US office in Chicago (DTB is a predecessor of Eurex) and after successfully establishing Eurex’s electronic trading business in the US moved back to Frankfurt in 2000 to head up global marketing and sales for Eurex. She moved back to Chicago in 2006 to further expand Eurex’s North American offices in Chicago and New York, and in late 2009, headed back to Frankfurt where she currently resides.

Throughout her career, Eckert has worked with people from many different cultures and expressed the need to differ her management style in the U.S. and Germany.

“We always think that Western culture is the same wherever you go but it is very different. The U.S. has a hierarchical structure and is very goal orientated,” she said. “In Germany, everything is much more of a discussion. We are a society of debate historically.”

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Voice of Experience: Gena Lovett, Principal and COO at Alexandra Investment Management

Gena LovettBy Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

Growing up as a little girl on a farm in Arkansas, Gena Lovett, now Principal and COO at Alexandra Investment Management, knew instinctively that she belonged on Wall Street. There was something about the ringing of the opening bell each day on the morning news that left a lasting impact and kept her dreaming of a high-powered career in New York City. Lovett’s mother, Beulah Lovett, the most influential person in her life, worked herself to the bone and dedicated her life to ensuring that she and her three siblings were taken care of after their father died when Lovett was just ten-years-old. Despite being a single, widowed, working mom, Lovett’s mother was able to keep her children on the straight and narrow after they moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. Eventually all four children would graduate from college, Lovett herself receiving a B.A. in Business Administration from Philander Smith College.

Fast forward just over twenty years later and Lovett has served on numerous boards, accrued years of financial services experience, developed a wide range of expertise managing front, middle, and back office operations, and currently finds herself in the esteemed position of being the first Black American Principal and COO at Alexandra Investment Management, an alternative investment advisor managing assets of approximately $500 million. As if that didn’t keep her busy enough, Lovett is also acting President of the New York Junior League (NYJL), an organization of 3,000 women volunteers who work to address some of the city’s most critical issues through volunteer services. Each member of the organization is dedicated to working just as hard as Lovett does, as 85 percent of the volunteers have full-time jobs and contribute more than 250,000 service hours.

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Voice of Experience: Michelle McCarthy, Chief Risk Officer, Russell Investments

Michelle_McCarthyBy Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

As the saying goes: “A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.” That is certainly the case for Michelle McCarthy, Chief Risk Officer of Russell Investments. While she attributes much of her success to luck, it’s clear that her moxie is really what’s allowed her rise to the top of her profession. Said McCarthy: “I’m willing to be a bit of a maverick and willing to do things even when I don’t feel completely ready.”

At 13, a fearless McCarthy declared her intention to major in political science. For many, that would be precocious; for McCarthy, it was just part of her college life, which began at that age. Of the University of Washington’s experimental “Early Admissions” program, said McCarthy, “was a really enjoyable experience. In high school, they are much less forgiving of ‘nerds’ than they are at college. It was a kinder situation socially than I’d been in before. ”

After graduating university at the age of 17, she attended Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Science. To earn some money while earning her Master’s, she took a part-time job at a student loan agency updating spreadsheets. After a short time there, she realized that she had found her true calling—finance.

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Movers and Shakers: Shannon Vetto, Global Exchange Traded Funds (ETF), Russell Investments

vettoBy Gigi DeVault (Munich)

Knowing how to maintain a high level of productivity while sticking to a grueling travel schedule may have given Shannon Vetto an edge when she came to Russell Investments in 1997. Before then, at Price Waterhouse LLP, Vetto worked as a client service audit manager in the firm’s investment company group—in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. Every few weeks she found herself in a new location, examining a new set of books and addressing a new set of circumstances.

For a financial asset firm seeking management capacity for a global product launch, itinerant experience like Vetto’s would prove to be a prescription for success. “It was pure luck,” she insists, “that I managed to get involved in an effort that was really Russell’s development overseas.” Vetto took a job as a manager in Operations at Russell, a role in which she was responsible for global vendor relationship management, fund accounting oversight, and financial statement preparation. She was quickly positioned to lead the development of operational infrastructure for Australian Funds products in Russell’s Sydney office, and in Russell’s investment trust business in the Tokyo office. Vetto recalls that she was new to the firm and wasn’t yet anchored in such a way that would make it difficult to relocate overseas.

Vetto’s tongue-in-cheek observation: The deal closer may have been that “I was okay with the travel.”

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Movers and Shakers: Virginia Volpe, CFA, Director, Hedge Fund Services, Global Transaction Services, Citi

Volpe, VirginiaBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

“Get comfortable in your own skin as fast as you can,” recommends Virginia Volpe, Director of Hedge Fund Services at Citi’s Global Transaction Services division. “You will be so much happier so much sooner – I only realized that four years ago,” she explained with a laugh.

Volpe exudes a good-natured confidence, something she attributes to to her flexibility. “One of my professional achievements is how easily I’ve been able to slip in and out of various roles, whether at Citi or going back to being a member of a small village,” she said, referring to her time in the Peace Corps in Sri Lanka working as a community developer.

It was during her time in Sri Lanka that Volpe developed an interest in finance. “I was really intrigued by microfinance, but did not have a firm understanding of capital markets” she explained. After receiving her degree in Economics and Latin American Studies from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Volpe began a career as an analyst at Reuters, and eleven years ago, she says, “I was invited to work at Citi and haven’t looked back since!”

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Voice of Experience: Mara Topping, Partner and Head of the Fund Formation Practice in the D.C. Office of White & Case

1795_thumb[1]By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

When Mara Topping, a partner in the D.C. office of White & Case, was a young girl, she lived in five countries on three continents, moving wherever her father, a high ranking USAID official, was stationed. Her childhood abroad—and her experiences with the beauty, diversity and poverty in Africa in particular—triggered a lifelong interest in other cultures and in international development. She applies this passion to her role as the head of the fund formation practice in the D.C. office of White & Case. “Emerging markets are a good part of the focus of the work that I do in private equity fund formation. I feel very good about seeing foreign capital mobilized into emerging markets where there is tremendous economic opportunity and a great deal of need.”

But the road to fund formation was not a direct one—Topping originally pursued a career in archeology. “Between Rome and Tunisia where I lived when I was younger, there are some of the best classical Roman sites in the world. It would have been hard for me not to be an archeologist. The experience of living in different cultures and the cultural diversity and issues of international development and social and cultural change were what I grew up with. And that’s what archeology really is—looking at long term cultural change and how societies develop and why.”

She completed her undergraduate archeology degree at Cornell University and a Master’s degree at the prestigious Institute of Archeology at the University of London. Topping went on to earn a Ph.D. in archeology from the University of Chicago, using two of the three Fulbright Scholarships she’d been awarded to do her Ph.D fieldwork in the Fiji Islands. There, she excavated one of only two known large pre-historic South Pacific ocean-going vessels.

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Voice of Experience: Robin Ross, Managing Director, Interest Rate Products, CME Group

Ross_3525-1By Jessica Titlebaum (Chicago)

“As soon as I walked onto the trading floor they had me hook, line and sinker,” said Robin Ross, Managing Director of Interest Rate products at CME Group. “You could almost taste what was going on in the markets.”

Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, Ross learned about Municipal Bonds from her father. When his eyesight deteriorated, she would read call features for the bonds from the books her dad brought home. She joined her father’s firm during her senior year of college and the company sponsored her to take the NASD Series 7 Test. At the time, she was the youngest woman to pass the test.

“There were no women in the municipal bond business in Little Rock,” said Ross. “Men thought it was cute that I wanted to sell bonds.”

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Voice of Experience: Diane Garnick, Investment Strategist, Invesco

Diane GarnickBy Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Called the “Princess of Perseverance” by many who know her, Diane Garnick brings her positive attitude to everything she does. “When people ask me what I am doing right now,” says Invesco‘s Investment Strategist, “I tell them I am in wild pursuit of lifelong dream to provide financial security for as many people as possible.” She added, “My greatest accomplishment is when clients who are senior people—the sophisticated investors—call me and ask ‘can you please explain this to me?’. That is the best feeling in the world because if I help them and they do a better job managing pension assets, every single person who worked, and is relying on that money for their retirement, will do better.”

It would be an understatement to refer to Garnick’s beginnings as humble. “We were very poor,” she said. “There were many times we didn’t have enough food to eat, many times we didn’t have hot water or heat, and other times that the house would be locked by the bank.”

Garnick remembered, “Someone gave us a very small black and white TV that if we adjusted the antennae just right we could get PBS. On Friday nights [while I watched the Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser program on PBS], I would think to myself, ‘wow these people who understand Wall Street…their kids are the luckiest kids in the world because those kids probably always have food. They never worry about whether there is going to be heat.’” She would ask herself, “Could you imagine being one of those kids?’” She vowed that, if she made it through those tough times, she would make sure that her kids—and children everywhere—would never suffer the way she and her siblings did.

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Voice of Experience: Colette Taylor, Managing Director and COO of Americas Institutional at Russell Investments

ColetteTaylorBy Gigi DeVault (Munich)

A well-stocked kitchen cabinet is more than a reassuring comfort; it can get you through some hard times. If you ask Colette Taylor, Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of Americas Institutional at Russell Investments and founding president of Russell’s Women’s Network, about her “kitchen cabinet,” she will not talk to you about shelves lined with orderly packages of staples and foodstuffs. Referring instead to Harvard professor Bill George‘s cabinet concept, she will tell you about a cabinet of advisors on whom she can lean for support in difficult times—times like those from which executives across the globe are emerging and through which they are leading their firms. In 2009, Taylor’s own personal board of directors, made up of coworkers, professional coaches, family members and friends, created a platform on which she could strip away distractions, get back to basics, and focus on relationships.

Getting back to basics can mean becoming leaner as an organization. This can be bad news for a program that receives corporate support, such as mentorship programs. As Taylor says, “A formal mentoring program can get lost because it can be considered less of a priority. But mentoring is always going on whether there is a formal program or not; people continue to reach out.” To get the most benefit from a mentoring program, she might remind you to look into your own kitchen cabinet. “One of the things that I have learned is that mentoring can have two facets—one for developing specific skill sets focused on the ‘professional,’ and one for work/life balance. Sometimes those are two different mentors because they are such different conversations. There is tremendous value in hearing from a diverse set of perspectives. This can uncover something you have never thought about—an idea from left field.” And that maverick perspective may be just what is needed. “I’ve been both a mentor and a mentee. I enjoy being on both sides; when you are a mentor, you are getting mentored at the same time. If you are really open to the mentoring relationship—really listening— it can change you.”

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