Lightning Talk: How Diverse Firms are Changing the Competitive Landscape

George is Penserra’s founder and Chief Executive Officer since June 2007.

Developing innovative products/services, implementing precise solutions, and engaging in effective recruiting are at the forefront of George’s leadership focus. George leads the Executive Committee, which sets the strategic direction of the firm and he works across all the business lines to ensure that Penserra is focused on our client’s most critical trading and investment objectives.  He is also Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Prior to founding Penserra, George was the Head of Transition Management and a Senior Portfolio Manager at Barclays Global Investors (BGI), which is now part of BlackRock. He joined BGI in 1993 as part of the portfolio valuation team learning the operations, asset valuation, and performance attribution side of the business. He quickly became an international equity portfolio manager and ran a team that managed $300 billion of developed market portfolios in separate accounts, pooled funds, and exchange traded funds. In his last few years at BGI, George led the implementation team of transition management. This service provides for multi-asset class portfolio restructuring using derivatives to inoculate risk while underlying physical securities are traded opportunistically. He implemented many innovative solutions including the creation of synthetic daily international strategy, expansion of the affiliate broker to better accommodate fixed income transactions and the use of multi-period optimization techniques to improve performance. During his tenure at BGI, George was also involved with firm-wide technology initiatives, risk management, best execution committee, investment performance committees, and a supervisory principal of the affiliate broker-dealer.

George is a graduate of California State University, Fullerton with a BS in Finance. He is also a graduate of Columbia University with a MBA focus in securities analysis and a graduate of University of California, Berkeley with a MBA focus in business strategy. He holds security licenses 3, 7, 24, 63, and 66.