Suzanne Shank has seen a lot of market volatility during her 35-year career, starting with the Black Monday crash in 1987, just a few months after she started on Wall Street.
But amid the market ups and downs, the people in the public finance industry have remained fairly stable, said Shank, who is being inducted into The Bond Buyer's first Hall of Fame class.
"A lot of my peers who were around in the early years of my career are still doing this, and that's because we're deeply committed to the public finance market, which is the engine that America runs on," she said.
And while public finance firms have come and gone — a list of teams on a New York City deal today would look very different from one in 1987, Shank said — companies like SWS that have stuck around have "demonstrated their commitment," she said. "And municipal issuers have long memories."
Along with Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, Shank founded Siebert Williams Shank in 1996. She transformed it from a startup into the largest minority- and women-owned investment banking firm in the country, a status the firm earned in 2019 with the merger of Siebert Cisneros Shank and The Williams Capital Group. She's also the largest equity owner of Shank Williams Cisneros & Co.
The firm broke into the top 10 list of senior managers of negotiated transactions in 2010 — at number eight— marking the first minority and women-owned business enterprise to do so.
SWS was the top MWBE firm in municipal bond underwriting in 2021 and ranked 14th overall last year, credited with 65 deals worth $8.1 billion. Municipal bond deals done by SWS as bookrunner have ranged in size from $3 million to a $1.75 billion transaction for the state of California, the biggest municipal deal ever senior-managed by an MWBE firm.
The Savannah, Georgia, native who now lives in the Detroit area is a self-described "road warrior" and member of Delta Airlines' three-million-mile club. "And that's domestic miles," she noted.
Shank got her start in the advisory space, and that has molded her banking career.
"It's not about the deal, it's about the client," she said. "All of our bankers have that posture now. It's the ongoing partnership that I've found to be the most important thing to our longevity in this business," Shank said.
"She is a visionary when it comes to growing our firm," said Gary Hall, a partner and head of investment banking (infrastructure & public finance), who nominated Shank for the Hall of Fame award and calls her a mentor. The growth and mergers have widened SWS' business into the equity and corporate debt markets, where the firm's clients include 74 Fortune 100 companies.
"She's a wonderful listener, extremely competitive and driven, but also very empathetic," Hall added. "I've learned from her more about the use of honey versus the use of lemon."
Shank sits on several boards, including CMS Energy, Spelman College Board of Trustees, Wharton Graduate Advisory Board, The Kresge Foundation and The Skillman Foundation. She has also won dozens of accolades throughout her career, from municipal finance honors like the Freda Johnson Award for Trailblazing Women to the Wharton School of Business' "125 Influential People and Ideas," to being one of USA Today's Georgia Women of the Century.
Shank is a graduate of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania with a Master of Business Administration degree in Finance, and the Georgia Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering.
