MarketGrader, a leader in smart beta investment solutions, today announced the addition of Mike Paul to its Board of Directors. With a focus on MarketGrader’s Smart Beta Indexes business, Paul will provide strategic guidance on matters of business development, key staffing considerations and commercialization opportunities for the firm’s global index library, as well as counsel on the product roadmap and partnerships.
“Mike brings a vast amount of experience building, leading and advising asset managers and ETF sponsors, model portfolio business lines and FinTech companies, domestically and internationally. Having Mike onboard will be tremendously additive as we partner with leading firms—established managers and upstart wealth platforms alike—to provide investors with superior equity strategies for growth and capital appreciation. Whether through licensing our Index suite for the basis of ETFs, annuities, model portfolios or more custom delivery like direct indexing, Mike’s experience will be a great asset,” said Carlos Diez, Founder and CEO of MarketGrader.
Paul started his career as part of the team that created iShares ETFs, which transformed the asset management industry. He was then tapped to start a European iShares business which grew to become the largest ETF franchise in EMEA. Later, in his time as Head of Product Development at iShares in the U.S., Paul oversaw the launch of 100+ products, including some of today’s largest ETFs: LQD, HYG, EEM and IAU. He then joined Warburg Pincus where they led an investment into Source, a European asset management firm. Paul became CEO and grew Source into a leading position in Europe before selling the business to Invesco in 2017, where he stayed on running the business until 2019. He is currently the CEO of a multi-family office and is a board member at CapIntel.
“Carlos and his team have built a truly unique product offering underpinned by a well-defined and longstanding systematic process. There are so many applications across the wealth and investment management landscape for their smart beta solution set, and I look forward to helping their team unlock the next stage of growth. With all the crowding in the market today, however, it’s performance that really stands out at the end of the day. And on that point, I couldn’t be more energized to be joining MarketGrader’s board,” Paul stated.
Diez continued, “With the vast majority of MarketGrader’s indexes outperforming their benchmarks and active peers over both the short- and long-term, we are excited to educate the industry and investors on the merits of our proprietary GARP + Quality stock selection methodology. With a greater than twenty-year track record for our index family, we feel stronger than ever that our process is well-positioned to provide investors and advisors continued success in service of their financial goals, unemotionally identifying durable growth-oriented companies trading at the right price.”
As a Director, Paul joins WealthTech entrepreneur Rob Foregger and visionary technologist Jim MacIntyre, whose business accelerator Product Lab entered into a strategic partnership with MarketGrader in 2023.
