Warren "Bo" Daniels, managing director and head of public finance for Loop Capital, will take over as chair of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board Oct. 1, bringing a three decade career to an organization set to take major steps forward in the coming year.
Jennie Bennett, associate vice president for finance at the University of Chicago will serve as vice chair. On the agenda so far is an updated budget, its first since 2023 after the Securities and Exchange Commission suspended its first proposal under the new rate card model, in addition to the rollout of a new and improved EMMA system that aims to be like Google for the muni market.
"The thing I'm most excited about and looking forward to as chair is just working with the board and the existing staff," Daniels said. "The team here is invaluable, they're terrific, they're outstanding and I look forward to that very much."
"This is my fourth year on the board, so it's been a great experience and I've served in several leadership roles that have also helped prepare me," Daniels added. "I was most recently chair of the Finance Committee and it's important to understand from all those perspectives the work that we do and those that we regulate."
Daniels' experience has run the gamut from Wall Street behemoths to boutique investment firms. He began his career at Goldman Sachs in 1989, leading the team as vice president and head of midwest public finance, before moving on to his first stint at Loop Capital Markets in Chicago, where he was managing director and head of public finance.
After six years with Loop in Chicago, Daniels moved to Morgan Stanley, where he was executive director out of the bank's Atlanta office and where he stayed for four years. After that, he moved to PNC Capital Markets, as managing director for almost three years until 2016, when he assumed his current role back at Loop.
"I've worked at two Wall Street giants, I'm pleased to work with a boutique investment bank, I've worked with numerous MAs and issuers and a number of investors," Daniels said. "From my perspective, not only as a regulated member but also as a practitioner, I've covered a lot of touch points in the municipal sector."
From his perspective, he singled out MSRB Rule G-27 on dealer supervision and Rule G-32 on primary offering disclosures as particularly important but didn't offer any concrete changes or updates to look out for yet. The real big ticket item top of mind is the rollout of a new EMMA platform, the result of a years-long process to update the board's technology systems.
"We expect to launch and new and modernized EMMA website in 2025 and that technology rollout is really important to us," Daniels said. "This will be with the introduction of a beta version of the new EMMA in early 2025."
Mark Kim, chief executive officer of the MSRB, said that the new EMMA will focus on three points: improving the quality of data they're providing for the industry, a new and improved interface with an improved search engine and the ability to customize your own interface based on what matters most to you.
"For the very first time in the MSRB's history, we will be offering obligor data to market participants, so you not only will find a new and improved interface to find issuers that you were looking for, but also conduit issuers and obligors and borrowers that are sometimes standing behind those issuers," Kim said. "Providing obligor data was a major goal and objective that we're really excited for."
He went on to say that the new and improved search engine on EMMA will resemble something like a Google search engine, that will allow market participants to search through continuing disclosures quickly.
"Since 2021, the MSRB has received approximately 27 million pages of continuing disclosures which comes to us largely as unstructured PDFs," Kim said. "Through this new search engine that we are going to roll out, you're going to be able to search through them and get the information you need and extract what you want," he added. "Also, you will find in this new EMMA an ability to create customized home pages and dashboard that will give you access to exactly the information you want in the way that you want it."
Daniels was also excited about rolling out a new Technology Advisory Group, "to ensure their feedback, impact and their perspectives are understood and heard," Daniels said. "We look forward to engaging with stakeholders as we move forward with similar town hall meetings with TAG and other entities."
He expects the first of these meetings to begin in Spring 2025, in preparation for the FY 2026 budget that the board will seek approval of at its July meeting next year. That'll be the board's first budget since its FY 2024 budget was
But overall, Daniels looks forward to taking his duties as chair very seriously.
"One of the other things that's certainly part of what the MSRB is about, and certainly a mantra of mine is following our North Star and that is, our mandate from Congress to do what we're doing," Daniels said. "And that's a responsibility that we take very seriously and I take very seriously as the principal regulator of the municipal securities market."
