Title: Director, Public Finance Underwriting
Firm: UBS
Age: 36
UBS Director Elizabeth Andreev said her career in the municipal bond market came about through somewhat of an accident, but it's a career that she has come to love.
“I had just started, out of college, as a CMBS trader at a hedge fund when the subprime crisis blew up that market,” Elizabeth said. “I jumped onto the first lifeboat I saw, which was a seat trading municipal bonds and ETFs.”
Working with munis was different than working with structured products, she said, calling the bond market “far less model-based and far more granular and esoteric.”
Elizabeth, now 36, began working in public finance in 2006 at Susquehanna International Group as a fixed income trader and market-maker for muni bond ETFs, where she also developed a proprietary intraday pricing model. In 2009, she worked on a collaboration with VanEck to structure and seed the first High Yield Municipal Bond ETF.
In 2010, US Bank hired her as an institutional sales team member, where she became the first municipal bond salesperson to receive the US Bank Summit Award for performance and leadership in 2014.
Elizabeth joined UBS in 2017 as a senior negotiated underwriter and core team member to help increase its public finance business, said Peter Hill, the firm's managing director and head of public finance.
Hill said Elizabeth was recruited for her “quantitative skills and robust understanding” of the investor base, and that she became respected by bankers and clients for her market insights and commentary.
Elizabeth also supports the development of her peers, assisting junior bankers and training new analysts, and is active in UBS's Public Finance Women's Network.
“I've really grown to love munis, particularly now as I've moved from sales and trading to syndicate,” Elizabeth said. “It's gratifying and humbling to work directly on deals which will have a tangible effect in improving a community and the lives of the people in it.”
