Thank you Robin for that wonderful introduction. It’s one my father wouldhave enjoyed and my mother would believe. I would like to firstcongratulate my fellow inductees Barbara and Bob and offer a hardy thankyou to the FIASI board and Hall of Fame members, my family, friends,colleagues and all those here in attendance this evening. It is truly an honorto be standing here before you.

Many of you are aware of my travel fetish and have listened to my stories,REPEATEDLY, over the years. There is one more to add to that collection. So I was in Westminster Abbey moseying about, reading the names ofcelebrated and worthy individuals buried in the hallowed floor of the Abbey. These included the likes of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Rudyard Kipling,Henry VIII and Philip Clark.  Who is Philip Clark you ask? He was theplumber who faithfully served the Abbey for decades. THEY INCLUDEDTHE PLUMBER WITH REAL HEROES!  So as I prepared for the eventthis evening, I reviewed the list of those in the FIASI Hall of Fame. They included, among others, Mike Bloomberg, Larry Fink, Bill Gross and JackBogle. So then it all hit me - I AM THE FIASI PLUMBER!

But all kidding aside, I have been blessed to have spent most of my careerworking with amazing people developing systems and most notably fixed income indices.  When I joined Shearson Lehman Brothers in 1986 afterseveral stints at Grumman Aerospace, Sperry Systems and Citibank, I was assigned to the nascent index team. I knew nothing about benchmarks butquickly became involved with the effort to launch the US Aggregate Index. The leading indices at the time were the Salomon Brothers BIG and the Shearson Lehman Government Corporate but investors had been using US Mortgages to outperform those benchmarks. So working with pension consultants, we built a more representative benchmark which was quickly adopted by investors - the US Agg. 

I use this as one example of how we were able to establish ourselves as the premier fixed income index provider. Markets evolve and its critical for products and services to evolve with them. Resting on your laurels only results in dead laurels. 

In my career the most important factor associated with success has been the exploitation of new technology. The index used to be calculated but once a month and it took 5 days to publish. Green bar paper was distributed to the trading desk where traders entered their spreads. It was then brought back to our edit pool where yields, maturity dates and coupons were manually entered into Monroe calculators. The results were then entered into a mainframe computer system after which the returns were scrutinized and outliers identified. We would then go back to the trading desk and argue over whether their handwritten entries looked like a ‘1’ or a ‘7.’ It was like the ‘give me the money - I have a gub’ argument from Woody Allen’s movie ‘Take the Money and Run’. Anyway it was wash, rinse, repeat for 5 days. When finally published, a group of admins would handle the distribution of the results via telephones which would ring all day. “The return of the Agg is 2.17 and the duration is 6.2 years. The return of the Agg is 2.17 and the duration is 6.2 years.’ It was enough to drive you nuts.

Fast forward: Index results eventually were made available on Telerate and ultimately this growing company called Bloomberg. Prices were collected from the desk electronically. Production was moved to PCs and then SUN workstations. Publication time was cut from 5 days to same day. Algorithms and processes were created to better catch anomalies. But the biggest difference was putting portfolio analytics on the desks of clients so that they could compare their holdings to the index and measure their risk. This system used Windows 1.0 when Bill Gates was still just a millionaire.

In my time at the helm of the USS Index battleship I witnessed remarkable change. In addition to the technological advances, I’ve seen the democratization of access to data. What used to be a private club of index users is now open to all. The index families have grown from US investment grade securities to include other products such as high yield, emerging markets, munis, non-dollar, commodities, crypto and equities among others. Index Advisory Councils have been established to solicit ideas and opinions from market participants as to how the benchmarks should evolve. This concept of shared ownership goes to the heart of the commitment to the industry. Publication frequencies and quality have improved. And the purveyors of these benchmarks have moved from investment banks to data providers and exchanges. And at the heart of this culture is the use of a ‘rules-based’ methodology which eliminates biases and is now permanently part of the index DNA.

There isn’t enough time to discuss in detail all of the milestones I’ve been witness to but my personal list would be the launch of the US Agg, the creation of the PC Product and its offsprings such as POINT and PORT, European Monetary Union which led to the creation of the Global Agg, getting the index up and running after being blown out of the Lehman headquarters during 9/11 (and ironically it was Bloomberg that donated office space to the index team during that time), ringing the bell at the American Stock Exchange for the launch of the first fixed income ETFs with the BGI iShares team, the creation of global Index Advisory Councils - the need for which was actually caused by me flippantly including the initial TIPS bond in the index. The market considered that decision to be a ‘capital offense’. Other milestones include the transition to Barclays after the Lehman failure (and let me note that there are people in this room that walked into Barclays without jobs to keep the index running while others were carrying their boxes out of the Lehman offices), the subsequent BRAIS acquisition by Bloomberg of the Barclays indices and the inclusion of China in the Global Agg. Thinking of all these accomplishments achieved with the hard work of my colleagues makes me beam with pride…..and also a little sweaty.

So what comes next? There is more to do by those now carrying the index torch. I envision the launch of futures products based on real-time fixed income indices which will radically change the derivatives markets. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will improve the quality of the benchmarks and help portfolio managers better identify opportunities and manage their risk. New ideas and concepts will continually challenge the status quo. For example, the Netflix-like saga regarding ESG is still in Season 1 and yet to be finalized. Markets will eventually be open nearly 24x7 and so index calculations will have to be continuous. And governance practices will continue to evolve as regulators become more involved with existing practices. Have fun with that one.

There are so many people to thank and I apologize for not being able to acknowledge them all. But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my competitors at the old Salomon Brothers, and Citibank, FTSE, Merrill, ICE and others for keeping me on my toes. And I would specifically like to thank two individuals who have been my partners, no more like brothers, through this amazing journey. First is Jack Malvey for his ideas and unbounded enthusiasm for this business and the second is Nick Gendron as we built this franchise together over the decades. Nick - please stand up. I also want to acknowledge the amazing job that Mark Howard has done to support the FIASI mission. Thank you Mark.

Lastly I want to thank my wife of 41 years for putting up with all the late hours, my travel, and time away from our family. I promise you that those 12 million accrued frequent flyer miles will be put to good use now that we are both retired. I also want to publicly state for the benefit of my two adult daughters that I do not and never had a secret family in Japan which they believed to be true for many years. 

So now if you’ll excuse me I’m being paged. I have to go and fix a leaky index pipe in the FIASI Hall of Fame. Thank you.