Recent Press, 2007 Archive, 2005 Archive

• Preaching Microloans to Hedge Funds , Investment Dealers' Digest Magazine, December 4, 2006
  
• Redefining Women, Alpha Magazine, October 10, 2006
  
• High Water Women Tackle Microfinance, Investment Dealers' Digest Magazine, August 14, 2006
  
• Changing the World, One Tiny Loan at a Time, NY Sun, August 10, 2006
  
• High Water Women Announces Second Annual Backpack Drive, July 19, 2006
  
• "New Hedge Fund Industry Non-Profit Planning June Fundraiser", Hedge Fund Intelligence, May 5, 2006
• "In a League of Their Own", Prestige Society Report, May 2006
• "High Water Women A Success at The YWLS of East Harlem Annual Career Day" , March 24, 2006
  
• "Getting In Deep for Charity", Shattered, March 10
  
• "Power Women, United for a Cause", New York Times, March 10
  
• "Out & About: Casino Night", New York Sun, January 27, 2006
• "New Philanthropy Holds Fundraiser", Lipper HedgeWorld, January 20, 2006

Preaching Microloans to Hedge Funds

By Colleen Marie O'Connor

December 4, 2006

Through her work with microfinance pioneer Accion International, Mara Otero has spent the better part of the last two decades working with poor and impoverished people, helping them receive small loans that they can use to better their lives. But just prior to Thanksgiving, Otero, now CEO of Accion, found herself on the Upper East Side of Manhattan facing a different crowd as she tried to communicate the investment merits of microcredit to hedge fund gurus.

Otero spoke to members and guests of High Water Women (HWW), a foundation focused on philanthropy and comprised almost entirely of women from the hedge fund universe. Although not her typical audience, Otero, and others like her, hope that's the case only for the moment - there's a growing belief that hedge funds could be key players in helping this industry grow by gaining access to the capital markets.

A native of Bolivia, Otero delivered a message that blended finance and opportunity, and it was easy to believe that her presentation to this audience of sophisticated investors differed little from her communication with Accion's clients. It's a necessary skill considering that Otero is working, she says, "to determine the realities of two worlds that have never met."

Accion is a microcredit organization founded in 1961 that today works in 23 countries. Since 1996, Accion has lent $9.6 billion to four million people who are largely cut off from mainstream financing. These borrowers, who reside mostly in developing countries, are primarily the working poor and are chiefly women. The Accion model permits groups of borrowers to join together. The collateral is essentially the group's character, and lending to a group rather than an individual can spread out some of Accion's risk. Some group members then take on individual loans, after they've established a foundation with Accion.

"It's time to put this into language that the capital markets can understand," Otero says. "Accion has identified factors that enable it to do work where 98% of people repay, and that's over the last 25 years."

The presence of such a high repayment rate, Accion hopes, will generate interest in the capital markets to pool together microcredit loans for future deals. Otero also noted that the institution developed a ratings instrument modeled on a methodology dubbed CAMEL that it has used since the early 1990s.

The fact that Accion's lending straddles so many countries struck a chord with HWW member Leslie Rahl, president of Capital Market Risk Advisors.

"There are investors who want exposure to foreign currency," Rahl says.

Furthermore, how effectively an individual pays back debt is a key aspect to FICO scores here in the US. Therefore, Rahl says, the historical data on Accion's clients' repayment history are an opportunistic feature for many microcredit institutions.

"There is a link to be found between the women who sell oranges at a market and Wall Street. That's the link we are trying to make to groups like High Water Women," says Otero.

While capital markets opportunities in microfinance have yet to take the form of deal flow, the High Water Women have nonetheless taken action.

The two-year-old foundation announced its second annual "Casino Night" will take place on January 18th, 2007. (Last year's inaugural effort raised more than $700,000.) The 2007 event will raise money for several organizations including Accion International and the Grameen Foundation, the latter of which is also a microfinance institution that grew out of Grameen Bank, the Balgladesh institution founded by this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.

(c) 2006 Investment Dealers' Digest Magazine and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Redefining Women

By Danielle Beurteaux

October 10, 2006

Kathleen Kelley of New York-based Kingdon Capital Management knows the value of networking. She made her entree into the world of hedge funds in 1990, when she was recruited by Tudor Investment Corp. on the recommendation of an ex-colleague at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where she had worked in economic research and forecasting. When Kelley decided to start a charity centered on building relationships between hedge fund women and nonprofits, networking naturally played an important role.

High Water Women was founded in 2005 by Kelley and Leslie Rahl, president of Capital Market Risk Advisors, a New York-based financial advisory firm. The two had met through 100 Women in Hedge Funds, an organization that focuses on career advancement. Kelley and Rahl both saw a need for a charity run by women that would focus on family- and child-related issues.

"Not-for-profits are constantly looking for people with business backgrounds," says Kelley, 41. "People kept saying, 'How do I volunteer?' Everybody wants to do it, they just don't know how to get started."

High Water Women is structured as a network of partner organizations - all preexisting charities - and volunteers. Kelley says her goal is to match the abilities of volunteers with the needs of charities and to establish long-term relationships. She describes hedge fund women as "aggressive, tough and strong-willed" - excellent qualities when applied to volunteer work. "We hope to be a catalyst to help women redefine their role [as philanthropists]," notes Rahl.

In the past year High Water Women has distributed holiday gifts to homeless children, led field trips for kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods and raised funds and hosted information sessions for a variety of charities. It recently took part in "Cool Women, Hot Jobs," a finance industry-focused career day at the Young Women's Leadership School, an all-girls public school in East Harlem, and in a professional development seminar at Iris House, a center that offers services for women affected by HIV/AIDS.

Kelley says the name of the charity - a play on the term high-water mark - is meant to show that the group is continually striving to top its best performance. That philosophy is paying off. In mid-October, Kelley, on behalf of High Water Women, accepted a Visionary Award from the National Council of Economic Education alongside such luminaries as John Whitehead, chairman of the Goldman Sachs Foundation, and McGraw-Hill Cos. chairman Harold McGraw III.

A self-described feminist, Kelley credits her alma mater, all-female Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, with giving her the tools to succeed in a male-dominated industry. She majored in mathematics and economics at Smith and received a general course diploma from the London School of Economics. She joined Kingdon, a $5.3 billion hedge fund, in 2005 as global macro portfolio manager after working in New York for Vantis Capital Management as a macro strategist.

Kelley hopes to further leverage the expertise of High Water Women's network of volunteers by expanding the charity's involvement in microfinance. The group is partnering with organizations that provide loans and financial assistance to low-income individuals and businesses globally - a logical extension of its mission, as microfinance clients are often women.

"I've worked in environments that are predominantly male, and I don't know why you don't see more women," Kelley says. "I'd like to figure out a way to fix that."
 

High Water Women Tackle Microfinance

Colleen Marie O'Connor

August 14, 2006

More than 100 attendees turned out Aug. 3 to hear Diana Taylor, Superintendent of Banks for the State of New York, moderate a symposium on microfinance that was hosted by one of Wall Street's new philanthropic groups, High Water Women, and held at the mid-Manhattan offices of law firm Schulte, Roth & Zabel.

The symposium focused on broadening the understanding of microfinance. Often associated solely with lending to an underserved, economically challenged or underrepresented client base, microfinance also comprises such financial services as insurance, payment services and savings.

The event was actually the group's third symposium on the topic but garnered the largest audience by far, said Leslie Rahl, president of Capital Market Risk Advisors and a member of High Water Women's board of directors.

"It's really hit home with many of us that we can bring to bear not only philanthropy but, with many of the skills our members have, ways to make the banking system more effective to help the poor," Rahl said.

Concepts such as hedging and leveraging intellectual capital were incorporated into the five-hour symposium, which featured such keynote speakers as Alex Counts, president of Grameen Foundation, Maria Otero, president of Accion International, and Michaela Walsh, founder and president of Women's World Banking.

High Water Women is also sending a few members on a microfinance due diligence trip in mid-August. Representatives will visit two West African nations, Benin, located between Nigeria and Togo, and Ghana. The goal, says Rahl, is to understand firsthand what methods of microfinance will work best in these countries.

The group, which was founded in 2005 by senior female executives in the financial services industry, made a splash on the Street when its inaugural Casino Night raised more than $750,000 in January.
 

Changing the World, One Tiny Loan at a Time

By LIZ PEEK

August 10, 2006

Why has microfinance become the hot topic of the philanthropy set? A conversation with two successful veterans of the rough-and-tumble hedge fund industry, Leslie Rahl and Leslie Lake, sheds some light.

Ms. Rahl, who once ran Citibank's derivatives business and now heads up Capital Market Risk Advisors, and Ms. Lake, who manages the hedge fund portfolio of the Invus Group, have earned their stripes in the financial world. Both are intense and tend to verbally dissect financial problems at a dizzying pace. Certainly, neither could be described as a soft touch.

Nonetheless, as founding members of a group called High Water Women, they have raised $1 million over the past 12 months to be given to a variety of charities in the New York region that assist women and children. They are just getting started.More recently, they have gotten caught up in the microfinance juggernaut, hosting three symposiums on the topic that drew standing room-only crowds.

Microfinance is the lending of very small amounts of money, normally less than $200, to impoverished people who want to start up or expand a self-sustaining business.The success of the approach, which includes the establishment of peer groups of borrowers who support and encourage each other and the availability of helpful business counseling, in regions like Africa has attracted considerable attention. As loans are paid back, they are recycled, providing organic growth and the ongoing improvement in the lives of an expanding number of people.

Enthused by the concepts discussed at the most recent symposium (chaired by New York State's banking superintendent, Diana Taylor), Ms. Lake just left for Ghana and points east (or possibly west) for a fact-finding trip, to explore the micro-lending activities of various institutions. She says she is as astonished by her conversion to philanthropy as anyone, noting that professional women are rarely approached about charitable donations. Until recently, Ms. Lake said she had been almost obsessively focused on her career.

"I was the original anti-philanthropy person," she says. Then she met the people at Strive (Support and Training Result in Valuable Employees), a program helping women get off welfare and into the work force, and was hooked.She now serves on the board of STRIVE, which appealed to her aversion to what she calls "the freebie concept."

Inspired by her first taste of giving back, she joined Ms. Rahl and a few other senior women in the financial arena in founding High Water Women, taking the name from a feature of the fee arrangements of many hedge funds.The organization is dedicated to philanthropy and volunteerism, and aims to encourage successful women to give back. In addition to seeking monetary gifts, the group also wants women to lend organizations their intellectual capital.

HWW is still in its infancy, and the board of seven highly placed women is in the process of defining the role of its members.What is clear, however, is that the members (an imprecise number falling somewhere between the 100 or so people who recently attended an event and the 1,800 on the e-mail list) are excited by microlending.

The recent five-hour gathering featured speakers from the Grameen Foundation, Accion International, and Women's World Banking, all giants in the field.The presentations galvanized the HWW crowd, some of whom returned to their offices and immediately booked flights to Africa.

What's the appeal? According to Ms. Lake, the attraction is that microfinance "seems to work. It doesn't take much, but you have the ability to empower other women. You can change a life." Also, microlending clearly stands up to the scrutiny of those interested in the bottom line.

Is microfinancing available only to women? Apparently not, but the success rate for women is higher than for men, who tend to be less reliable clients.Consequently, about 75% of the clients are women.

Some are given money (often as little as $20 or $30) to buy extra farm animals or to expand a baking operation or start a hairdressing business. For very little money, one can finance a woman's livelihood, often allowing her children to go to school. Without a doubt, microfinance offers up a "ripple in the pond" aspect, where small investments can have a far-reaching impact on communities.

Could it work in America? HWW is looking into this question, but is not optimistic. First, any start-up business with a chance of success normally requires substantially more funding in America. In addition, as Ms. Rahl points out, America does not have as much of a gender gap as the developing world. If someone has a decent business plan in America, male or female, they are likely to find funding from traditional for-profit institutions or government agencies like the Small Business Association.

The HWW people are looking into working with for-profit microlenders as well as with not-for-profit groups.As the activity has taken root, large commercial banks are entering the arena as well. However, they are rarely interested in making the truly small-scale loans that characterize most microlending.

The involvement of High Water Women in the microfinance world will not be confined to writing the occasional check. As important, they intend to lend out their financial expertise.

Ms. Rahl already has helped out by finding a suitable currency desk for one outfit needing to hedge its exposure to various thinly traded African currencies. HWW also expects to help micro-lenders find ways to securitize their loan portfolios so as to make them attractive to socially minded institutional investors.

These women think big. If they are not satisfied with the banking facilities available for some of these activities - why not start up a bank? As Ms. Rahl says: "We don't want to reinvent the wheel; we just want to change the world." And so they may.
 

New hedge fund industry non-profit
planning June fund raiser

5 May 2006

High Water Women, the industry philanthropic group that spun out of 100 Women in Hedge Funds earlier this year, will hold a benefit wine tasting on June 9.

The fundraiser is a first for the group, which was founded to provide senior female hedge fund professionals with a venue for volunteering their time and financial resources to New York-area grassroots charities that focus on women, at-risk teens and children. The group's particular areas of interest are family homelessness, education, career development opportunities and health services.

The wine tasting will be held at Fred's in Barney's New York at 660 Madison Avenue. The Invus Group will underwrite the event, allowing all ticket sales to benefit STRIVE, a Harlem group that assists welfare recipients move into the work force.

High Water Women was founded by Kathleen Kelley and Leslie Rahl, former board members and heads of philanthropy and volunteerism for 100 Women in Hedge funds.

For further information, go to www.highwaterwomen.org.
 

In a League of Thier Own

Prestige Society Report, May 2006

High Water Women a Success at The Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem Annual Career Day

By Shahri Griffin

On Friday, March 24th the 400 students at The Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem were inspired, educated and motivated to achieve their best at the school's annual Career Day. The theme was "Cool Women, Hot Jobs" and thanks to the great job done by HWW member and volunteer Samantha Greenberg (Chilton Investments) twenty-one women from Financial companies, hedge funds and investment firms participated -- making up 25% of the volunteer base. We were thrilled with the turnout and both the girls and the volunteers all had a great and memorable time! 

read more about Cool Women, Hot Jobs 

Power Women, United for a Cause

By Jennifer A. Kingson

10 March 2006

Leslie Rahl has been running a hedge fund advisory firm for a dozen years, after a long career running the derivatives desk at Citibank.

A typical day might be spent meeting with clients from Japan and Norway, but one recent afternoon she was accompanying Dasharah Green, a fifth grader from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.

''What do you do?'' asked Dasharah, who is 10 and wants to be a pediatrician, while waiting to tour the NBC studios in Midtown Manhattan with some classmates and an equal number of high-powered women.

''I actually run my own company,'' said Ms. Rahl, who is 55 and wore an electric blue coat with fur trim.

''What is it about?'' Dasharah asked.

The hedge fund business is about many things, but it is mainly about men. Women manage money at just a tiny fraction of the nearly 9,000 hedge funds, the lightly regulated partnerships that invest in everything from stocks to exotic derivatives. Not only is it a business dominated by men, but it is also known for its aggressive testosterone-driven trading.

So it may not be surprising that women in the hedge fund business have been active in forming connections among themselves, primarily on behalf of philanthropic endeavors.

Last year, Ms. Rahl helped set up High Water Women, which supports several charities for women and children through fund-raisers and events like monthly outings with children from poor New York City neighborhoods. High Water Women is meant to be a local offshoot of a similar national group called 100 Women in Hedge Funds.

Although members of High Water Women tend to focus on the tasks at hand rather than on shoptalk, there is a tacit solidarity among them.

''When I first heard of 100 Women in Hedge Funds, I thought that there was one woman in hedge funds and I was it,'' said Kathleen M. Kelley, who founded High Water Women with Ms. Rahl. ''People at hedge funds don't tend to interact with one another.''

Ms. Kelley, 40, who is the global macro portfolio manager at Kingdon Capital and a mother of three, including an infant, and the other hedge fund women say they do not see much discrimination in their industry.

But Ms. Rahl says that the way the deck is stacked in her field can sometimes work to her advantage.

''The discrimination that exists -- in terms of High Water Women, it's a plus,'' she said. ''We've found it much easier when we're trying to do fund-raising to get the attention of men, to get the attention of big institutions. And hedge funds are also something that are pretty hot on the Street,'' which helps prompt some wallets to open.

A consultant to the financial services industry, Charles B. Wendel, said that in terms of charitable works, ''I don't see guys doing a lot of that, hedge fund guys.''

''They don't do much of that except writing checks -- just after they buy the Ferrari,'' Mr. Wendel said.

Ms. Kelley said it seemed to be true that women were more nurturing in this respect. Several years back, when she started a mentoring program for 65 students in Bedford-Stuyvesant for the I Have a Dream Foundation, she said, ''the women were just unbelievable, the amount of concern and time they put into it, and the men just -- well, there wasn't as much interest in it.''

High Water Women derives its name from ''high water mark,'' the industry term for the investment return that hedge funds or managers must produce to earn incentive fees. Thus, in philanthropy as in business, ''we're going to constantly be striving to do more than we have done in the past,'' said Ms. Rahl in describing High Water Women.

Not all the women are in hedge funds or at the apex of their careers. At the NBC studio tour recently -- which brought nearly 20 students from P.S. 44 to see where the nightly news and ''Dateline'' and ''Saturday Night Live'' are produced -- one mentor was Heather Neal, a 26-year-old office manager at a hedge fund, who said she volunteered because she used to be a first-grade teacher.

Another was Lynda Feld, a personnel recruiter at Aavis Resources who said she did a lot of charity work (including weekly kitchen prep for God's Love We Deliver, a meals program) and wanted, for professional reasons, to meet women in hedge funds.

''There are several clients of mine that have been hedge funds, so I'm always looking to increase my reach'' in the industry, said Ms. Feld, who is 50.

The students were participants in an outreach program run by Partnership With Children, whose clinical director, Barbara L. Cavallo, was on hand for the tour. She said that many of the children came from troubled homes and craved one-on-one attention from an adult; for some of them, a High Water event was their first visit to Manhattan.

''Their parents are all for this,'' Ms. Cavallo said. ''It's an opportunity for the kids to meet new people who talk to them about college, careers.''

Ms. Rahl says a career in financial services has changed radically for women in the last three decades.

''I grew up in a generation where there weren't very many senior women'' in financial services, she said, adding that she was one of 50 women in her class of 1,000 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1972, ''when I went to work at Citibank, there were two women vice presidents in the entire worldwide bank, and they were not allowed to eat in the V.P. dining room.''
 

OUT & ABOUT

A.L. GORDON

New Philanthropy Holds Fundraiser

By Chidem Kurdas, New York Bureau Chief

Friday, January 20, 2006, HedgeWorld News

NEW YORK (HedgeWorld.com) - High Water Women, a charity group founded by women from the hedge fund industry, held a casino night at the Roseland Ballroom that attracted between 600 and 700 people.

While the organization is for women, plenty of men attended the benefit and gambled eagerly - with proceeds going to charities for women and children in the New York area. The top players were given prizes and those who wanted to hone their skills could attend poker clinics.

The organizers, Leslie Rahl, president of Capital Market Risk Advisors Inc., and Kathleen Kelly, global macro portfolio manager at Kingdon Capital Management, brought in several Wall Street banks as sponsors, including UBS, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch.

Ms. Kelly said the benefit was organized on a tight schedule, starting in October, but industry people pitched in and it was expected to raise US$800,000 to US$1 million. An estimated 75% of the participants were from hedge funds.

Many women in the financial industry now earn more and have more discretionary income to devote to philanthropy, with senior women setting an example in becoming more active in giving, Ms. Kelly said. High Water Women's aim is to help such women get involved in charitable causes.

Ms. Rahl and Ms. Kelly were previously members of 100 Women in Hedge Funds, another philanthropy that has grown fast. Ms. Kelly said she and Ms. Rahl wanted to start a group that focused more on charitable giving in New York; 100 Women has a national focus and educational interests.