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She is regarded by her peers as a business builder, establishing operations and developing industry standards that have fuelled the evolution of the derivatives markets. Her achievements include spearheading the U.K. Financial Services Authority’s markets division and developing the International Swaps and Derivatives Association into a global trade body. Those accomplishments, amongst others, make Huey Evans a worthy recipient of the Derivatives Intelligence Outstanding Contribution Award.
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“I have known Gay for more than 20 years from the early days of the derivatives market. As a practitioner and later as a long-serving and distinguished chairman of ISDA, Gay has made a huge personal contribution over a quarter of a century to the development of the OTC markets,” said Michael Spencer, group chief executive officer at ICAP. “Our whole industry owes her a big vote of thanks for this extraordinary achievement and also for her unflagging charm and good humour. This award is most thoroughly deserved.”
It is her work at the FSA that Huey Evans regards as one of her greatest achievements. Between 1998 and 2005, she was director of markets and capital markets sector, established the market abuse regime in the U.K. and worked with exchanges when shareholders voted that such institutions should go public. “Getting the exchanges to actually allow for public exchange, since they were all previously mutuals, was very brave,” she said. “I would get hammered at any international regulatory meeting, with people saying, ‘Why would you allow that to happen?’ To now, however, see them stand on their own two feet, be for profit, and still have a corporate responsibility to do the right thing for the market place, gives me great pride.”
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Huey Evans’ time at ISDA has also been tagged as another highlight of her career. From 1994–1998, she transformed the association into a global derivatives trade body. She made the association more committee based, expanded its European and Asia Pacific offices and operations, and began to focus more on impending tax and accounting issues. Another achievement at ISDA was working to get the U.K. to adopt netting and preparing for the introduction of the euro. “We had a divided board on whether the euro will exist or whether it would not exist. I made clear to the members that it doesn’t matter whether it’s going to happen or not, we need to be prepared,” said Huey Evans. “I think establishing a protocol with [former Allen & Overy partner] Jeff Golden was key at the time if the euro was to be introduced, since if we hadn’t, there was the fear that all of our documents would go null and void. So we created a protocol that included a pot of documents setting out, for example, when liras become euros, etc, and what the pricing mechanism was.”
“The contribution that Gay Huey Evans has made to the derivatives markets is simply unmatched. No other individual has contributed so much, so effectively, so unselfishly and for so long. Not a lawyer herself, Gay fought tirelessly as Chair of ISDA for legal certainty and best practices,” said Golden, a principal author of the ISDA Master Agreements. “Her sincerity, commitment and good judgment impressed the regulators with whom she met in that role and, in due course, made herself an effective regulator too. It also ensured that things that needed to happen did happen. Gay’s positive attitude and good spirit has been an inspiration for so many of us in the industry and stands as evidence that people, and not just economics, can make all the difference.”
Gay Huey Evans began her career in the financial markets in 1976, when she joined Paine Webber Jackson & Curtis after graduating from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. She worked on the trading floor in fixed income, particularly in treasuries and flower bonds, the latter of which would mature at par as payment for federal estate taxes on the death of the investor. During her time at the firm, she set up the commercial paper and money market operations and was also involved in trading certificates of deposit and bankers’ acceptances.
In 1984, Huey Evans joined Bankers Trust with the responsibility of financial institutions. The role involved approaching boards and presenting cases on asset liability management and how they could reduce their GAAP using interest rate swaps. “This was quite novel at the time for these types of users and they learnt a lot about liquidity management and how you close that GAAP out,” she said. The role also exposed Huey Evans to global financial institutions in Japan, where Bankers Trust’s Tokyo office at the time was run by Brady Dougan, the current ceo of Credit Suisse.
Up until 1990, swaps and derivatives operations of all sellside firms grew significantly, leading to the first USD1 billion interest rate swap towards the end of the decade. Huey Evans went on to run Bankers Trust’s fixed income sales division, which involved merging the cash and derivatives sales operations. She later moved to London in 1990 to run Bankers Trust’s warrants and options book after Allen Wheat moved to Credit Suisse First Boston, later becoming ceo and chairman of the firm. During that period prior to her move to London, she noted the derivatives business had changed dramatically. “We spent a lot of time looking at counterparty risk in terms of what is my risk and exposure. We were also bringing in strong mathematical people to assess that counterparty risk and value at risk...these were new concepts at the time.”
Her time at Bankers Trust in the 80’s highlights the challenges faced with swap documentation, prior to the birth of the ISDA Master Agreement. As swaps operations grew, a backlog of documentation emerged, documentation that differed from counterparty to counterparty. “We would all come in at the weekend to get our documentation up to where it should be. It was a fantastic time, everybody worked together,” she said. “We needed something generic, something that was going to help us with the documentation. This was one of the main reasons as to why ISDA was later founded.”
She joined the ISDA board in 1990 while working at Bankers Trust in London, later becoming chairman of the association in 1994. Her appointment came at a time of a number of lawsuits between counterparties concerning disputed derivative transactions. Like today, trips to regulators and lawmakers were commonplace during her time at the association. During the period, she also co-chaired the Bank of England’s joint standing committee on derivatives with Lewis “Woody” Teel, a former executive v.p. for trading, risk and regulatory compliance at Bank of America, who passed away in 2008. The aim of the committee was to look at the appropriateness of derivatives transactions and the knowledge of those users entering the transactions.
After leaving Bankers Trust in March 1998, prior to its acquisition from Deutsche Bank later that year, Huey Evans joined the FSA. At the FSA, she was responsible for exchanges, clearinghouses and settlement houses. She later became responsible for the U.K. Listing Authority following its transfer to the FSA, and was also appointed chairman of the joint forum under the Committee on Banking Supervision, the International Organization of Securities Commissions and the International Association of Insurance Supervisors. Among her roles, she worked closely on market surveillance, transaction reporting, and the market abuse regime. “I have more welts and scars from the market abuse regime than anything else,” notes Huey Evans. “Nobody wanted it. It had never been written down before. If you look at what was considered market abuse when we began constructing it, there was no such thing. There was no definition of insider dealing in terms of market manipulation.”
After seven years as a regulator, Huey Evans left the FSA in 2005 and moved to Citigroup as president of Tribeca Global Management, then later as head of governance of Citi Alternative Investments. During her time at Citi, she worked in setting up the firm’s European hedge fund operation.
In 2008, she was hired by Jerry del Missier, co-ceo of corporate and investment banking at Barclays Capital, as vice chairman of investment banking and investment management. At BarCap, she was tasked with building the sovereign wealth business based on her knowledge of regulation and relationship management at the buyside and sellside. The aim was to make sovereign wealth funds more accessible across all of the firm’s businesses.
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“Gay’s work on behalf of the financial services industry, particularly in the area of derivatives, makes her a perfect choice to receive the Outstanding Contribution Award,” said Thomas Kalaris, chief executive, wealth and investment management, and executive chairman, Americas at Barclays. “She was a valuable member of the senior client team at Barclays, and we congratulate her on this tribute.”
In 2010, as the banking industry entered a period of deleveraging, Huey Evans joined the LSE, followed by board director roles at Clariden Leu and Aviva. Huey Evans, who is a trustee of U.K. Wellbeing of Women and The Wigmore Hall Trust, was also appointed to the board of the Financial Reporting Council in April. She also enjoyed a brief stint at ISDA again as vice chairman of the board of directors and non-executive chairman of Europe, as derivatives regulation began to heat up globally.
Of the many areas of derivatives regulation being drawn up in the U.S. and Europe, it is the impact that regulation will have on bilateral bespoke derivative contracts and, subsequently, end users, that is of particular concern to Huey Evans. “For a corporate, bank, or other entity that needs to take some risk out of their balance sheet, it’s going to be too costly to do so,” she said.
“My fear is that you will have a dealer saying, ‘If you do this and we custom tailor this transaction to match your risk, then it’s going to cost you too much, so why don’t you instead take the risk and we will put you into a standard plain vanilla thing. So I think the market will grow, but I think we will have much more risk exposure in the world, which defeats the objective that is to take risk out of the system.”
—Rob McGlinchey