About the Managing Partner

Michael Durante has spent over twenty-five years in high finance.

Mr. Durante began his career with U.S. Federal Reserve, serving as a bank

holding company inspector and bank examiner. While with the Federal

Reserve, he also spent time training in the central bank’s Loan & Discount

Department, better known as the “Discount Window” as a credit analyst. He

completed all Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve training schools

including Commercial Banking; Credit; Capital Markets; and Financial

Accounting, including training in forensic accounting.

While in the a field, Mr. Durante worked on numerous large financial institution exams and

inspections including Chase, Bank One, KeyCorp, National City, Fifth-Third, PNC Financial and

Mellon (BNY Mellon) et al. He also participated on the joint-regulatory agency Shared National

Credits (“SNICs”) review team, which audits the nation’s largest loan syndications including credits

originated by Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America et al.

Following the Federal Reserve, Mr. Durante spent almost a decade on Wall Street as an institutional

equity analyst, most notably with Salomon Brothers, then the highest ranked financial services

research firm. During his tenure as an institutional equity analyst, he covered both large, complex

banks such as First Chicago, Wells Fargo, The Northern Trust Company, PNC Financial, Mellon, and

U.S. Bancorp to name a few. He also covered key non-bank financials also known as “shadow banks”

and was named to the Wall Street Journal’ ‘All-Star Analyst’ team as well as voted onto Institutional

Investor Magazine’s ‘Best of the Street’ equity analyst survey. He covered non-bank financial firms

such as MBNA (now BofA), Capital One, Household International (now HSBC), CIT, Beneficial

(HSBC), AmeriCredit (now General Motors Financial), First USA (JPMorganChase) and The

American Express Company et al.

Practicing in specialty finance and electronic payments solutions, Mr. Durante was a member of the

investment banking team from Salomon that sold the AT&T Universal Credit Card business to

Citibank, the largest credit card portfolio sale of its time, and worked on numerous equity and debt

offerings during his career for financial firms such as MBNA, Bank One, Capital One, CIT, The

Money Store, Ford Motors’ Associates First Capital, Quicken Loans, Household Auto Finance and

AmeriCredit et al.

Mr. Durante joined institutional investment firm, John McStay Investment Counsel following

Salomon Brothers. At McStay, Mr. Durante became the firm’s youngest ever partner and managed

roughly $2 billion in equities related to finance, payment systems and financial technologies for

institutional investors worldwide. He was an early adopter in investing in leading financial technology

firms such as PayPal (eBay), Fair Isaac and Alliance Data Systems et al.

He started his first hedge fund in 2004, which eventually became BlackwallPartners, LLC focusing

on financials, financial technologies and electronic payments. His career audited annual alpha is 18%

relative the S&P 500 financials index.

Mr. Durante was the first to write an opinion letter to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission

warning of the inherent flaws in so-called ‘mark-to-market’ accounting (Fair Value Measurement) and

helped prepare testimony delivered by former Federal Open Market Committee member Dr Robert D.

McTeer, Jr. before the U.S. House of Representatives’ hearings on Fair Value Measurement in the

after-math of the Financial Crisis. Mr. Durante remains a critic of the overly broad use and misuse of

the accounting measure.

Mr. Durante has been a guest contributor to Forbes Magazine’s forbes.com/economics; the National

Center for Policy Analysis economics blog; guest on CNBC; and quoted in the Wall Street Journal;

Forbes; Fortune; and the American Banker et al.

He is a member of the Economics Society of the London School of Economics; the Royal Economic

Society; and the American Economic Association. He is a member of the Vanderbilt University

Alumni Association; the London School of Economics Alumni; the Oxford Business Alumni; and a

member of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford.

He has studied finance and economics at Vanderbilt, where he holds a B.A. in Economics, the

London School of Economics, where he did post graduate studies in Economics and Corporate

Finance, and Oxford University, where he holds a Master’s (PgD) in Financial Strategy from

Oxford’s Saïd Business School.