During Frank Chin's nine years as head of Citi's public finance business, the firm ranked No. 1 in negotiated underwriting. Colleagues who worked with him say the edge was not technical expertise alone, but his ability to understand enormously complicated problems, identify what mattered and explain it in a way that earned clients' confidence.
That ability to turn technical depth into client trust became a through-line across Chin's career, from complex airport and infrastructure financings to management of one of Wall Street's dominant municipal franchises and efforts to modernize market disclosure. That career will be recognized with Chin's induction into The Bond Buyer Hall of Fame.
Chin "had an ability to take enormously complicated financial issues, understand what really mattered, and then explain and apply them in a way that earned the confidence of clients and colleagues alike," said Michael Lexton, a principal at Lexton Infrastructure Solutions who worked under Chin in the 1980s at Smith Barney.
That approach was rooted in the unusual combination of engineering and finance that brought Chin into public finance in the first place.
"It was an opportunity to combine my engineering experience with my finance education … becoming a practical application of all my graduate degrees," he said.
After earning a bachelor's degree from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he worked for New York City during the financial crisis. After he was laid off, the city reassigned him through a federal contract to an off-balance-sheet project.
Chin then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and entered public finance at a time when the industry was growing.
Chin joined Smith Barney in 1978 and remained in the same public finance department through a succession of mergers and name changes that ultimately made it part of Citigroup.
Technical banking, rather than management, had been Chin's focus. Leadership came later — and unexpectedly.
Chin eventually spent nine years as head of Citi's public finance business, even though running the group had not been part of his original career plan. "They were looking for someone to run the department. I [got] tapped on the shoulder. I got the job. It was pretty daunting because it wasn't something I was expecting to do," he said.
The result was a sustained market leadership position: during all nine years Chin ran public finance at Citi, the firm ranked No. 1 in negotiated underwriting.
Over his career, Chin applied that technical approach to some of the country's most consequential and complex issuers, completing marquee transactions for the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, the Bay Area Toll Authority and Las Vegas McCarran International Airport. He retired from Citi in 2015;
Airports were a particularly natural fit for a banker who had once considered becoming an aeronautical engineer.
"I wound up working on Wall Street because I thought financing airports would be just as interesting as building airports, and honestly, I got to Wall Street at a good time to be interested in airport finance because I got there just before deregulation started," Chin said.
One of Chin's early airport assignments involved an Orlando airport expansion, the beginning of what he said became work on 30 to 40 airport expansions around the country during his career.
The same instinct to make complicated systems work better later extended beyond individual financings to the market itself.
Chin served on the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board from 2005 to 2008, including one term as chairman, and helped spearhead transparency initiatives that included the development of EMMA.
"We invested a lot of time and effort to basically bring technology to the municipal business because prior to that it was actually pretty backward," Chin said. "Everything was paper. We worked very closely with the [Securities and Exchange Commission] to get them to agree that the EMMA system made sense, and actually it led to a number of rule changes, which eliminated actually the need to do physical mailings."
Colleagues say Chin passed the same combination of technical rigor and client judgment to younger bankers.
Robert DeMichiel, a managing director at BofA, said Chin combined that banking and management acumen with mentorship throughout his career. DeMichiel considers Chin a friend, mentor and "probably the smartest person I've ever known."
Chin is also one of the best "technical bankers" in terms of deal structuring and financial analysis, DeMichiel added.
"He's just an all-around great guy, great banker, always does what's right for the client," DeMichiel said.
Lexton said Chin's mentorship showed that technical skill and client trust were not separate parts of the job.
Chin took Lexton under his wing, serving as a mentor "not only on the quantitative side of the business, but in showing me how to earn and retain the trust of clients," Lexton said.
The mentoring relationship continued through the years, even after Chin retired.
