Oppenheimer hires Beth Coolidge to lead its public finance business

Oppenheimer & Co., Inc. has hired veteran Chicago banker Elizabeth Coolidge as head of public finance.

Coolidge comes to Oppenheimer from UBS, where she led the Midwest public finance business. UBS shuttered its muni business in October.

Also joining Oppenheimer from UBS are Chicago-based bankers Liberty Ziegahn, managing director, and Madison Maher, director.

Oppenheimer will now have a trio of women leading its public finance team: Coolidge; Beth Wolchock, who is head of municipal underwriting; and Cynthia Henry Pinto, head of municipal sales.

“In my 35 years in my business, I’ve never run across another firm that has all women at the top on the muni side,” said Coolidge, who started her new position Tuesday.

She replaces former Oppenheimer public finance head Bill Reisner, who in December moved to Janney Montgomery Scott LLC as the firm’s head of municipal finance. Reisner was at Oppenheimer for nearly 13 years.

Oppenheimer will now have 23 bankers working out of nine offices across the country. Coolidge will also oversee the firm’s two-year-old municipal restructuring group.

The hires come amid a larger Wall Street retrenchment — capped by Citi’s December exit from the business — following two years of declining volume, increased competition for fewer deals and tightened underwriting spreads. Coolidge said she’s optimistic that some of those pressures would ease in 2024.

“If we see rates continue to come down, we will see more opportunity,” Coolidge said. “It could pick back up on the taxable refunding side. And a lot of the COVID money is now gone, so you’re going to start to see the need for more issuance as that money dries up.”

Oppenheimer has previously predicted that issuance will be between $390 billion and $400 billion next year, around 12% up from 2023.

“With the loss of players like the UBS and Citigroup, there’s going to be a need for more innovative ways to fill the gap around lending,” Coolidge said. “We will be growing the business strategically, working with clients where we provide high quality solutions to their issuers, similar to what my team and I did on the Chicago [Sales Tax Securitization Corporation] deal,” she said, referring to the Bond Buyer’s 2023 Deal of the Year.

Coolidge will report to Robert Lowenthal, President of Oppenheimer and Head of Investment Banking. “We are thrilled to welcome Beth, Liberty, and Madison to Oppenheimer’s public finance banking team,”  Lowenthal said in a statement. “Their proven track record of success and deep industry knowledge will substantially enhance our capabilities and positions us as a leader in the municipal finance business. Equally important, this move to expand our public finance banking team demonstrates that the firm is committed to opportunistically investing in this business.”

The hires follow Oppenheimer’s 2020 acquisition of boutique San Francisco-based underwriting firm Brandis Tallman LLC.

Coolidge joined UBS in 2017 after a four-year stint at PNC Capital Markets LLC, where she led the bank’s public finance efforts in the Midwest. Prior to PNC, Siebert was at Siebert, Cisneros Shank & Co. for five years. At Siebert, she served as head of the office that she had helped establish a decade earlier. Her first stint there ended in 1999, when she moved to the former Banc One Capital Markets Inc., which later merged with JPMorgan. She then joined the former Lehman Brothers before returning to Siebert in early 2008.