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.
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