CAREER CHANGE: M&A TO MBAS

“Twenty-five years is a long time to do one thing,” says John A. Wing, chairman and chief executive of ABN Amro Inc., who left the investment banking firm at age 62 earlier this month to start a new career as a college administrator and teacher.

A securities lawyer by training, Mr. Wing has spent the last quarter-century as an investment banker, helping oversee the 1995 acquisition of Chicago Corp. by ABN Amro Holding NV. The Dutch bank renamed Chicago Corp. ABN Amro Inc.

Mr. Wing began July 1 as executive director of the new Center for the Study of Law and Financial Markets at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He says the program will be one of the first in the country to integrate law and finance — rather than the traditional law-and-business pairing.

Mr. Wing says that most business school and law school graduates these days are unschooled in derivatives or securities law but are coming to a profession where “you really need to know both.”

As free markets become a global reality, it will be increasingly important for the United States to export the legal concepts that have regulated U.S. financial markets.

Crain News Service