ABOUT US
ABOUT US
Gary Barnett has over four decades’ experience in the financial markets and financial regulatory space. He has advised large financial institutions, including banks, broker dealers, insurance companies, asset managers, private equity firms, hedge funds, as well as smaller, early-stage companies involved in fintech and other leading-edge areas, on financial, compliance, governance, and regulatory matters, and strategic decision making and implementation.
He has deep knowledge of, and experience with, a wide variety of financial products, structures and markets, and deep knowledge of US law, regulation and operations relating to lending, securities, derivatives and commodities activities as well as investment management, asset servicing and trust and custody law and operations.
Before going to serve in government in 2011, Gary had been a partner and practice group leader in Wall Street and International law firms, including Shearman & Sterling, and Linklaters, obtaining extensive transactional experience. In addition, from late 2007 through mid-2011 he worked extensively on regulatory matters and on a variety of significant workout efforts, setting the stage for his joining the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in 2011. In August 2011, he joined the CFTC to organize and head the newly created Division of Swap Dealers and Intermediary Oversight (now the Market Participants Division). There he established the Division’s swap dealer registration and compliance programs; led the responses to the futures commission merchants and retail foreign exchange dealer crises following the failure of MF Global, including the reorientation of Division's Exam Branch and the adoption of the FCM customer protection rules; and formed the Division's CPO/CTA team and led many of its key initiatives.
After leaving the CFTC at the end of 2014, Gary joined the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in January 2015, in the Division of Trading and Markets as the Deputy Director, where he oversaw the division’s Office of Broker-Dealer Finances, Office of Derivatives Policy, Office of Trading Practices, its Volcker rule team, and its participation in various global regulatory initiatives.
In addition, he was a member of the SEC’s Cybersecurity Working Group and its Fintech Working Group, and was its senior most representative on multiagency groups including the Senior Supervisors Group and the Supervisors Roundtable on Governance Effectiveness. In the course of his work for the SEC, Gary provided vision and leadership in connection with advancing broker-dealer supervisory practices in the areas of capital, liquidity, margin, risk management, culture and conduct, governance effectiveness, new products, and outsourcing and vendor risk. He also significantly contributed to the agency’s work on broker-dealer cybersecurity and fintech, including blockchain, big data and artificial intelligence. He focused on the uses of fintech by regulators and the ways in which new technologies may affect the regulatory approach. The Director of Trading and Markets commented that “Gary has been an insightful and innovative leader of our broker-dealer supervisory efforts. Gary has made invaluable contributions by proactively focusing attention and pursuing progress on a variety of emerging issues, from risk management to cybersecurity to fintech.”
After leaving the SEC at the end of 2017, Gary formed Digital Capital Markets, LLC, a private placement broker dealer registered with the SEC and a member of FINRA. He is the general securities principal and the CCO of DCM, holding Series 7, 79, 24 and 63 licenses. In light of his extensive financial transactional, workout, governance, and regulatory compliance experience, He also provides business consulting guidance and investment banking services to clients.
Gary recently served as chief legal officer for an early-stage company in the data space, and received a certificate of completion in Data Science Principles from Harvard. He currently serves as a non-executive director to the board of a preeminent hedging and risk mitigation counterparty for global banks via total return swaps. In addition to the FINRA licenses mentioned above, he also is a member of the New York, California and Oklahoma bars, was an Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, was the Chair of the Practising Law Institute’s annual conference on Securitization (from 1995 through 2010), and has been the Co-Chair of PLI’s annual conferences on derivatives since 2011.
Wenchi Hu is a financial regulatory expert with vast supervisory and compliance experience. She has over two decades’ experience in the financial services and financial markets.
She previously worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as senior special counsel in the Division of Examination on examination of securities exchanges and self-regulatory organizations and later, in the Division of Trading and Markets on clearing supervision. She became the head of the SEC's clearing supervision program, managing more than twenty-five staff attorneys, financial economists and financial analysts. In this capacity, she oversaw registered clearing agencies and was responsible for their risk supervision under the regime established under the Exchange Act, Title VII and Title VIII of the Dodd-Frank Act. She was also responsible for registration applications, requests for no-action relief, exemptive relief, and rule filings and advance notices by clearing agencies. She worked extensively with the SEC's examination team and the registrants on compliance with the SEC regulations. Through her supervisory experiences at the SEC, she has developed in-depth knowledge of the SEC’s supervisory framework, the SEC's self-regulatory organization regulatory regime and the enhanced supervisory framework under Title VIII of the Dodd-Frank Act. During 2013-2015, she was the point person at the SEC, exclusively responsible for CDS clearing and sat on ICE Clear Europe’s global supervisory college hosted by The Bank of England.
After Wenchi returned to the private sector, she has worked with broker-dealers, alternative trading systems, securities and derivatives clearing houses, investment advisors and fintech companies on complex issues relating to regulatory compliance, corporate governance, risk management, technology system integrity and resilience, particularly emerging issues created by new technology. She was previously a partner of Latham & Watkins and served as an independent public director on the Board of OneChicago, a futures exchange jointly regulated by the CFTC and the SEC. She was also a member of OneChicago’s Regulatory Oversight Committee, a committee mandated by the CFTC rules to oversee the exchange’s regulatory oversight function and surveillance.