Going Global as a Competitive Advantage

La Salla recalls how he and Pershing Advisor Solutions CEO Mark TIbergien were in Prague on April 28 for a convention of independent financial advisors, mostly from Europe, and “you could see the trend growing.” Even American’s tendency to be insular may be threatened. Brueckner says that it was an “eye-opener” to many people in the American investment world when capital raising in other markets exceeded that of the United States a few years back. “When John Thain, CEO of the NYSE, made that a major platform for the exchange’s activity,” recalls Brueckner, it “caught on in the SEC as well.” Americans in the investment world are waking up, says Brueckner, “to the fact that there are certainly opportunities overseas and we have to adapt; otherwise we’ll lose the position that we have as the center of the capital markets.”

Other countries around the world, says Brueckner, may be “playing catchup a little bit in creating a capital markets infrastructure that we have mastered pretty well here, but we’re going to be playing catchup in being part of the world economic and political system in which those countries are more facile.”