ABOUT US
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John Swift | CEO
John brings immense depth of experience to the team. As a 30-year veteran of the financial services sector, John has led teams and projects across a wide spectrum of disciplines. He has held senior positions in sales management, marketing management, operations management and technology management. Prior to joining Rockfleet, John most recently served as a Senior Vice President and head of internal sales at Central Park Group LLC, where he helped grow the asset base by establishing a team of alternative investment professional who specialized in working with investors and advisors in developing portfolios of alternative investments including private equity, hedge funds and private real estate.
He served as a Head of Internal Sales, Investment Solutions at UBS Financial Services Inc., developing and delivering teams of professional that specialized in assisting advisors in the design and deployment of customized portfolios (traditional advisory product solutions and complex alternative investment product solutions). As head of the internal sales effort, he built a consultative sales and marketing team of over 25 professionals which provided high quality service and product expertise to 10,000 financial advisors across the globe.
His leadership successes include technology, where he led PaineWebber’s effort to provide online solutions to clients back in the nascent stage of the web, which proved to be a game changer for the firm and its clients. Because of the breadth and depth of this project, he had to navigate, gain buy-in and execute across all departments within the firm. He then led a team that would chair the Wall Street consortium that developed data standards along with Microsoft and Intuit, again changing and improving the landscape for the firm and its clients. He then moved on to lead marketing (both traditional and e-marketing) teams that would streamline how the firm utilized a central resource as opposed to separate and redundant marketing efforts. After several years of successes, he was tapped to head up sales efforts for the firm’s Bond Desk, Advisory Services Desk, and Alternative Investments Team. While running these efforts he was tasked with reengineering those units’ respective operational services teams, which increased client satisfaction ten-fold according to client surveys after the project’s completion.
John’s passion for creation led him to product development and management while with UBS’s Alternative Investments Team. His exposure to such firms as Carlyle, Blackstone, and Warburg Pincus on various projects afforded him the opportunity to witness the very best of the best at streamlining and reengineering companies to achieve efficiencies and synergies, both organic as well as engineered. He brought this mix of expertise to Rockfleet as Head of Wealth Management. John founded the technology and branding startup MonkeyHaus! Productions, LLC, which may be viewed at www.monkeyhausproductions.com.
John, who trained as a classic French Chef at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park, continues to express his passion for cooking by volunteering for the Loaves & Fish program in Westchester County, NY by feeding the area’s low income families, something he loves to do.
He is registered with FINRA as a Series 7, 24, and 63. -
Cathy Corrigan | President
Cathy has been involved in financial services for over 35 years. Her public finance experience began in 2000, when she joined the Municipal Securities Group of UBS (formerly PaineWebber). In 2004, she joined Siebert Brandford Shank & Co., L.L.C. as its Director of Operations and Chief Compliance Officer. She founded Rockfleet in 2009.
Cathy has expertise in a wide range of functions, including investment banking, underwriting, trading, financial advisory, sales and marketing, product management, finance, operations, information technology, re-engineering, and compliance. She has served as co-Financial Advisor to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the State of New York Department of Budget, including over $1.1 billion in Green Bonds (Climate Bond Certified).
Cathy founded AuthentiFact, Inc. (“AuthentiFact”), a subsidiary of her consulting firm, Swicor NYC LLC. AthentiFact seeks to democratize the due diligence process by breaking the project into components where different subject matter experts can bid on that section of the analysis, e.g., legal, accounting, technology, benefits, operations, etc. The firm is currently accepting enrollments of experts and will begin marketing the service to potential clients when a significant number of experts are enrolled. AuthentiFact may be found at www.authentifact.net.
Cathy’s efforts at continual improvement span the majority of much of her career. In her first role at PaineWebber, Cathy reduced headcount in her area by 40% while increasing the user-base by 200%. Also, at PaineWebber, Cathy headed Broker Redesign, a unit within the Reengineering Division. The Division reported directly to the President. Among other accomplishments, Broker Redesign automated processes used by brokers and sales assistants, eliminating manual processes equivalent to 68 FTEs. In PaineWebber’s Glossary and Pricing Department, Cathy implemented a compressed work week, eliminating overtime, and implemented a centralized repository for municipal securities, eliminating single-terminal charges throughout the home office and branch network. As Group Manager of Client Reporting, she slashed operating costs in statement processing and market data, yielding savings of $2 million annually.
Cathy has significant experience in managing large-scale, cross-department projects. At PaineWebber, she was selected to head the Other Assets team of the Y2K project, i.e., anything that was not a mainframe computer. This project required coordination across all home office departments and all branch offices. She also led the effort to replace PaineWebber’s securities master file with a new relational database, requiring user testing with all system, operations, and business areas utilizing the data. Cathy was tapped to manage the integration for her department for the acquisitions of Kidder, Peabody and J.C. Bradford, and being acquired by UBS. She worked on the novation of UBS’ Municipal Securities Group’s ISDA master agreements for its derivatives business to UBS Securities. She has been the primary firm liaison with regulators for the past fifteen years – both at Rockfleet and Siebert Brandford Shank – and an additional four for the Municipal Securities Group at UBS.
Cathy is registered with FINRA as a Series 4, 7, 24, 27, 50, 53, 63, 66, 79, 99, PG and SIE and with the SEC and MSRB as a municipal advisor. She is a member of Mensa, and participates in the Municipal Bond Club of New York, the Municipal Forum of New York, and Northeast Women in Public Finance. Previously, she has participated in several SIFMA and SIA committees.