Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. Hires Senior Investment Director

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. has hired Greg Williamson to the newly created position of senior investment director, effective June 5.

Williamson is tasked with administering the Wisconsin Investment Fund, which the WEDC created earlier this year. The fund aims to provide $50 million to support innovative, young businesses.

“I am excited to help lead the WEDC’s efforts in new business formation within Wisconsin, particularly through equity funding of new businesses formed by traditionally underserved individuals or in underserved markets,” Williamson wrote in a LinkedIn post.

The fund will partner with professional venture capital managers who will identify companies in which to invest, then match the state’s investment in each company. In particular, the venture capital program is meant to boost early-stage technology and growth startup firms.

Never miss a story — sign up for CIO newsletters to stay up-to-date on the latest institutional investment industry news. 

“Managers could select very early-stage biotech companies, right out of a lab at the University of Wisconsin, software companies gaining market traction, or anything in between,” the WEDC outlined in a March blog post.

The WEDC expects to leverage more than $500 million in private small business funding over the next 10 years. It also has publicly set a target of investing 29% in companies that historically lack access to capital.

The Wisconsin Investment Fund’s initial capital injection comes from the U.S. Treasury Department’s State Small Business Credit Initiative as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. In March, the WEDC announced that once the venture capital fund managers were selected, company investments would follow.

Prior to joining the WEDC, Williamson was managing director at Exos Financial, and before that, he was head of strategy at capital market company Pluribus Labs. He also served as CIO of the American Red Cross, and prior to that position, he was the CIO and the director of trust investments at BP America.

Sweden’s AP7 Hires Head of Asset Management

Hargreaves Lansdown Names Toby Vaughan CIO

Tags: Diversity, Greg Williamson, senior venture investment director, start-ups, WEDC, Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, Wisconsin Investment Fund

Democrats on the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets expressed skepticism on Friday at three of the four market structure proposals that the Securities and Exchange Commission introduced in December 2022.

Representative David Scott, D-Georgia, asked Haoxiang Zhu, the director of the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets, if the SEC would consider implementing the update to Rule 605, which would require brokers to publish monthly quality-of-execution reports so that more trading data is available to the SEC before it implements the other three proposals.

This request mirrors many of the comments on the proposals, which Zhu acknowledged. A spending bill advanced by the Republican-controlled House Committee on Appropriations also blocks all of the market structure proposals except the Rule 605 update. Zhu said he would consider Scott’s and others’ comments.

Scott answered that “using the latest and most available statistics” is critical to evaluating the merit of the other three proposals.

Never miss a story — sign up for CIO newsletters to stay up-to-date on the latest institutional investment industry news. 

Representative Wiley Nickel, D-North Carolina, said many of his constituents are concerned about these proposals, especially the Order Competition Rule, which would require rapid auctions for certain retail orders to achieve more competitive pricing. Nickel asked Jessica Wachter, the director of the SEC’s Division of Economic and Risk Analysis, who was called to testify, if she would agree that smaller retail orders for less liquid stocks will actually receive reduced execution quality if nobody shows up on the other side of the proposed auction.

Wachter answered that stocks outside the S&P 500 actually received better price improvement in the SEC’s economic analysis of the Order Competition Rule than those inside it and that the analysis suggested this “might not be a concern.”

Swing Pricing

The swing pricing proposal is among those that would be blocked by the GOP spending bill on the recommendation of Republicans on the House Committee on Financial Services. The various blocked proposals in the bill will have to be negotiated with Democrats before anything can be passed, but if Democrats also are skeptical of swing pricing, there might not be much to negotiate on that item.

Voiced opposition to swing pricing from Democrats in Congress primarily revolves around the proposed hard close, which would require trades be executed by 4 p.m. Eastern time. Under current rules, a trade must be received by 4 p.m., but not executed, in order to receive that day’s price for a mutual fund.

The problem for many Democrats is that the SEC proposal would make processing orders for investors on the West Coast very difficult, given that 4 p.m. ET is 1 p.m. PT and 11 a.m. Hawaii-Aleutian time. Representative Brad Sherman, D-California and the ranking member of the subcommittee, said the proposal would have a “horrendously discriminatory effect” on investors living in the Pacific time zone.

Sherman’s time zone concern closely mirrors concerns expressed by other Democrats during a full committee hearing in April.

Mike Hadley, a partner in the Davis & Harman law firm and a member of the Society of Professional Asset Managers and Recordkeepers (SPARK) Institute’s advocacy team, says the concern about time zone discrimination is “a real issue.”

He explains that it takes time for a recordkeeper to process trade orders. He estimates that trades would likely have to be received by 12 noon ET to receive that day’s price. Some retirement plans would have to get their orders in the day before, Hadley explains.

This time zone issue was not invented by the SEC or by swing pricing, but the swing pricing proposal “aggravates it by many times over.”

Sherman also expresses skepticism about the swing pricing mechanism itself, which passes the costs of trading on to the sellers of a mutual fund instead of the holders in order to mitigate dilution and discourage panic selling. Sherman likens this to charging for life preservers or lifeboats. He argues that investors will be less likely to invest in mutual funds if they believe they will be penalized for selling in tough times in the future.

He says swing pricing “seems like the worst idea you could have in trying to achieve our objectives.”

Sherman pressed Wachter to ask if the SEC had done any analysis on whether the swing pricing proposal would discourage investment in mutual funds. Wachter did not offer a direct answer.

Other Democrats at the hearing also pushed back against some of the market structure proposals offered by the SEC.

Tags: broker-dealer, execution, order competition rule, SEC, swing pricing