When Kym Arnone took over Jefferies' municipal investment banking business in 2015, the firm ranked 20th among senior managers, with just a 0.80% market share. Eleven years later, she has led Jefferies' steady march up the underwriting ranks to fourth, with a 7.74% share through the first half of 2026, according to LSEG data.
Arnone attributes that climb in large part to a philosophy she has followed throughout nearly four decades in public finance: bankers have to differentiate themselves through the ideas they bring to clients.
"We compete on the basis of ideas," Arnone said. "That's our currency and that's how we've built our standing in the rankings — through creative banking."
That approach — combining creative banking with relentless execution and a client-first focus — has carried Arnone from helping create an entirely new municipal market sector to building Jefferies into a top-five underwriting firm. It also earned her recognition as the first still-active head of public finance at a major municipal underwriting firm to be inducted into
Few public finance bankers can claim they built a market sector from scratch. While veteran New York banker Kym Arnone's legacy will always be tied to the creation of tobacco settlement bonds, colleagues and clients more often point to a creative and relentless work ethic that hasn't changed in nearly four decades in the industry.
"I refer to her as the James Brown of the municipal bond industry," said Nat Singer, senior director at PFM Financial Advisors LLC. "She's the hardest working individual in the industry."
Arnone began her career in the public finance department at Bear Stearns in 1985 after graduating from St. John's University. She moved to Lehman Brothers and then Barclays when it acquired Lehman's public finance group. She joined Jefferies LLC in 2015 as head of municipal investment banking.
Her rise to that position came despite being told earlier in her career that she "wasn't management material," a judgment Arnone said became one of the biggest professional motivations.
At Jefferies, she has since hired more than 30 professionals and credits the firm's growth to that expansion, support from its executives, a client-first philosophy and the creative banking she sees as its competitive currency.
That belief in competing through ideas long predates her tenure at Jefferies. Perhaps its most consequential example came with Arnone's pioneering work on tobacco settlement bonds, a roughly $100 billion sector built in the wake of a 1998 agreement from cigarette manufacturers to compensate states for the cost of caring for sick smokers.
After working with New York City to craft the sector's first tobacco bonds, Arnone "took the show on the road, if you will," she said.
"When I look back at the tobacco sector since 1999, my team and I have been creative and opportunistic for issuers who have divested from risk and investors who have been compensated for that risk."
For Arnone, however, developing a complex financing idea is only part of the job. Making that complexity understandable to clients is another skill colleagues say has helped distinguish her.
"In addition to her financial acumen and ability to execute a solid transaction, the ability to communicate complexity simply is really where Kym excels," Chime said.
That combination of creativity and execution is reinforced by a work ethic that Singer, whose role as a financial advisor often puts him across the table from Arnone, said has barely changed over the 40 years he has known her.
"The client always comes first and the work product has to reflect that — she's always been like that," Singer said, adding that as recently as a few weeks ago she was "pulling all-nighters" to finish a request for proposals.
"She requires and expects 100% commitment from her people but at the same time she's fun to work with," Singer said. "She doesn't like to lose and she wants to win every single assignment; that's why she's been so successful."
That competitiveness also extends to the details of execution, including the pricing-day decisions that can determine whether an issuer gets the result it sought.
"Pricing days can sometimes be challenging, and having a banker with influence and muscle within their firm is important," Chime said. "Kym has an uncanny ability to make sure the transaction is always on track and the issuer feels well-represented."
For an issuer like Ohio, Chime said, that commitment can come down to the last basis point.
Arnone has also increasingly directed that same intensity toward building bankers, not just transactions. With two grown daughters, Arnone said being a mother has made her more "protective" of her team and imbued her with what she calls "mama bear energy."
Chime said she's enjoyed witnessing that energy during her work with Arnone.
"The way she develops [younger bankers] is phenomenal," Chime said. "She is developing the next generation of high-quality bankers."
For Singer, that may be the most transferable lesson of Arnone's career: success in public finance still rests on the combination of ideas, preparation, client service and how bankers conduct themselves over time.
"If you want to be successful, find a person like Kym Arnone for an example of how you're supposed to act in this business, how you're supposed to cover your account and how you're supposed to act toward other people," Singer said. "If you do that, it's a recipe for success."
