Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
October 14, 2021 at 03:53 PM
What You Need to Know
- The law firm is strengthening its broker-dealer and investment adviser legal advisory practice.
Gabriel Benincasa, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s first-ever chief risk officer has left the financial watchdog to take up a partnership at Holland & Knight.
Benincasa joins the Am Law 100 firm’s Northeast corporate, M&A and securities practice group, and will split his time between the New York and Washington, D.C., offices.
The SEC’s chief risk officer role was created by then-chairman Jay Clayton in 2019 as a way for the watchdog to strengthen its risk management and cybersecurity efforts. In the role, located within the Office of the Chief Operating Officer, Benincasa coordinated the agency’s identification, monitoring, and mitigation of risks facing the commission as an organization.
Benincasa is a trained accountant, lawyer, and risk and compliance specialist who has held senior-level positions at CIT Group, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and other financial services companies. Directly before joining the SEC, he operated a consulting practice advising companies on legal, compliance and risk issues.
In a statement announcing Benincasa’s arrival, practice co-head Amy Leder said Benincasa’s SEC experience, combined with his “extensive knowledge of broker-dealer and investment adviser regulations and a variety of financial products” will be of great benefit to the firm’s clients.
Benincasa is also a seasoned transactional lawyer, with experience in M&A, IPOs, insolvency, secondary trading, as well as anti-money laundering, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Sarbanes-Oxley, and Volcker compliance.
He was drawn to practicing law at a law firm—instead of reigniting his consulting business or returning in-house at a financial institution—because he felt it was the “right time” to develop a securities practice focused on the broker-dealer, investment adviser and digital asset spaces.
