(Bloomberg) — Kathleen Moriarty, a lawyer who performed an instrumental position within the creation of the primary exchange-traded fund, has died. She was 69.
Her demise was introduced by Chapman and Cutler LLP in New York, the place she was senior counsel within the company and securities division. No trigger or different particulars have been offered.
Moriarty spent virtually 30 years breaking floor within the fastest-growing section of the money-management business, guiding merchandise to market reminiscent of the primary hedge-fund replicator, the primary bodily commodity ETF and the primary leveraged providing.
ETFs are low-cost, funding automobiles that observe an index or a basket of securities and commerce like equities on an change. Moriarty constructed a status because the go-to lawyer for anybody looking for to promote an revolutionary ETF that regulators could scrutinize carefully.
“I’ve represented most everyone who’s finished an uncommon ETF,” Moriarty said in a 2014 interview.
She earned the nickname “SPDR Lady” for her work on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Belief (ticker SPY), which State Road Corp. launched in 1993, and on subsequent SPDR merchandise. With $357 billion in property, SPY at the moment reigns as the biggest and oldest ETF within the $6.5 trillion business.
“Kathleen was a pioneer within the funding administration business and was on the forefront of a few of our business’s most impactful innovation of the final 30 years,” Morrison Warren, co-leader of Chapman’s Funding Administration Apply Group, mentioned in an announcement. “All through her time at Chapman, she was a humble and considerate colleague and universally acknowledged as a kind-hearted and beloved particular person.”
Reggie Browne, the co-global head of ETF buying and selling and gross sales at GTS generally known as the Godfather of ETFs, referred to as Moriarty “one of many ETF business’s GOAT Tremendous attorneys” in a LinkedIn publish.
“She was on the helm of almost each upward inflection level in ETF product improvements,” he wrote. “She was an excellent good individual with a heat coronary heart and welcoming spirit.”
A Chicago native, Moriarty moved along with her household to New York when she was 5 and lived in Manhattan for many of her life. She graduated from Smith School in Northampton, Massachusetts, with a level in psychology and artwork historical past, and earned her regulation diploma from the College of Notre Dame close to South Bend, Indiana, the place she met her husband, Robert John Keefe.
Previous to Chapman, Moriarty labored at regulation companies together with Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP and Carter Ledyard & Milburn LLP, based on her LinkedIn page.
It was throughout her time at Katten Muchin Rosenman that Moriarty represented Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss of their first attempt by a US applicant to register a Bitcoin ETF with the US Securities and Alternate Fee.
Whereas that endeavor was unsuccessful — US regulators nonetheless have but to approve a bodily backed crypto ETF — Moriarty went on to signify firms utilizing blockchain know-how and different funds seeking to put money into digital property.
“I really feel honored and blessed to have identified and labored with Kathleen,” mentioned Deborah Fuhr, co-founder of ETFGI, who served on the board of Ladies In ETFs with Moriarty. “She was concerned in lots of new improvements. All the time gave freely of her time. Was a pleasant, heat, pleasant pioneer within the ETF business. She will probably be missed.”
–With help from Christopher Condon.
