Title: Vice President/Senior Analyst
Firm: Moody’s Investors Service
Age: 37
Bola Kushimo, vice president/senior analyst Moody’s Investors Service, is a seasoned credit analyst who specializes in local government ratings. She’s 37 years old and is based in Texas.
She is in charge of a portfolio of high-profile issuers in the region and collaborates regularly with other local government analysts at Moody’s around the nation.
Bola has helped design training programs at Moody’s that explain the credit impact of environmental and social factors on ratings. She frequently presents the agency’s credit views at meetings and conferences, promoting transparency around ratings and methodologies.
Her deep and broad experience helps her work with investors, issuers and underwriters, where her views are widely sought.
“The work at Moody’s is very interesting,” she said. “Credit analysis is constantly changing because of the risk profile and credit issues are changing. This year has been one for the record books because of the pandemic and trying to understand what it means for different local government issuers.”
Bola is an active member of both regional and national groups of the National Federation of Municipal Analysts. She is also an ex-officio board member for the national chapter and serves as the membership outreach chair. Bola has served on the board of the Southern Municipal Finance Society since 2015 as education chair and membership chair.
She said she found the people in the public finance space to be genuinely helpful, caring and willing to talk through challenging issues in these economic times.
In addition, she has been active for many years in developing content and lining up speakers for the annual Bond Buyer conference in Texas.
She is active in community outreach, supporting several organizations including Covenant House New York and Saint Jude Hospital. And as part of her faith-based group, she aids a local organization that fights homelessness and volunteers to help feed the homeless.
She's also in a group that supports abused women as they transition to back to personal and financial independence.
"It's an issue that tugs at my heartstrings," she said. "It's an opportunity to help these abused women — who are highly educated but perhaps have found themselves in an unfortunate situation — to show them the steps they can take for their own self-suffiency. It's a hand up, not a handout."
Also, together with her husband Ade, Bola helped create an
Bola lives with her husband and two sons, 8 and 5, in Dallas. She has just taken up golf — "because we have all boys in my house and I'm the only girl so I figured 'why not!'" So now I can go out and beat the boys at their own game."
