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Birmingham native and former CEO Daniel Coleman is BSC’s 16th president

Birmingham native and former CEO Daniel Coleman is BSC’s 16th president

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Daniel Coleman, a Birmingham native with more than three decades of experience in finance and strong ties to BSC, has been appointed Birmingham-Southern College’s 16th president.

Coleman, who was CEO of the global financial services firm KCG Holdings until its 2017 sale, has ties to BSC on many levels; he introduces himself as “a student, teacher, and Trustee.” He is currently an adjunct professor of finance and taking an undergraduate course in calculus, as well as being a member of the BSC Board of Trustees.

As he was welcomed to the Hilltop in his new role by students, faculty, and staff, Coleman said he wants Birmingham-Southern College to continue to expand its educational reach as it builds for its second century in Birmingham.

“I want us to define what it means to be a great liberal arts college,” he said. “Birmingham-Southern is a great school now, but it can be even greater for the next 100 years.”

From English to Finance

PresClassroom.jpgColeman’s own background and work experience has epitomized the value of the kind of personalized, broad-based education that BSC provides. The 54-year-old earned his B.A. in English at Yale University. He landed a job in finance straight out of college, and earned an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago while working.

He went on to play a leading role in the evolution of high-frequency trading in global financial markets.

Until its 2017 sale to Virtu Financial, New York-based KCG was a leader in the securities and financial services industry, Before KCG, Coleman was CEO of GETCO, a privately-held automated trading firm based in Chicago. Prior to that, he worked for 24 years for UBS and its predecessor firms, ending up as global head of equities for UBS Investment Bank.

He rose to head of global equities there; from 2005 through 2010, he oversaw a business that included the world’s leading cash equities execution business and equity research department, and handled global equity derivatives, global prime brokerage, and more.

PresShot2.jpgFrom there, he moved on to Chicago-based market maker GETCO, first as global head of client services and equity trading and then as CEO, replacing the retiring founders in 2012. In that role, he expanded the business beyond its core of automated market making and led a merger with competitor Knight Capital Group.

Engineering the merger and integration of Knight Capital Group and GETCO Holdings to form KCG, President Coleman helped create the leading trader of equities in the United States and one of the leading securities trading firms in the world. While integrating trading platforms, back offices, and corporate cultures, he and his managing team raised debt, shed assets, cuts costs, and returned over $500 million to shareholders. With the sale of the company four years after its creation, shareholders who bought the stock at the company’s inception enjoyed a nearly 100% cumulative return.

In addition to the boards of KCG and GETCO, Coleman’s past corporate board memberships include NASDAQ Inc., the Options Clearing Corporation, the Boston Options Exchange, and the Securities Industry Financial Markets Association.

“I started my career in finance on a trading floor, but now, those jobs are almost all gone,” he said. “When I think about college, I think about that kind of rapid professional evolution that’s happening in every field. We need to make sure students have jobs when they graduate, but we also have to make sure they have the ability to adapt so they have careers decades later. That’s something the liberal arts does like no other form of education.”

A Commitment to the City

PresHat.jpgColeman and his wife, Brooke, a fellow Birmingham native, began dating in Chicago and had three children while living in Connecticut. They returned to Birmingham in 2009, committed to make their hometown their family’s home and to help it reach its potential. Coleman served on Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin’s transition team and remains the co-chair of Woodfin’s financial advisory team, working to improve the city’s management of its finances. He has also served on the boards of the Alabama Symphony Endowment and of Build Up, an innovative early-college workforce development program centered in the Ensley neighborhood.

But for much of his time in Birmingham, he was spending most of each week working in New York or Chicago. When KCG was sold, he returned home full-time.

Not too long before, BSC’s dean of business programs, Dr. Sara Robicheaux, had reached out to Coleman to determine if he might participate in the school’s program for entrepreneurs in residence. At the time, Coleman declined because of his long-distance work schedule. When he returned, he called Robicheaux and said he would love to teach.

Since then, he has taught one course a year in finance; he currently teaches BU 277, “Financial Markets: How, Why, and When.” At the same time, he jumped into taking undergraduate courses at BSC, first in the computer programming language Python, and now in calculus. 

That time in the classroom, he says, has brought an appreciation for the quality of professors at Birmingham-Southern College.

 “I have discovered that the faculty at BSC are very much here to support students,” he said. “I have taken classes at a lot of places and while I’ve had some incredible teachers, I’ve not seen a lot of examples of professors being on students’ side. That’s something really special.”

For more information, see the press release as well as Coleman's CV.