The Investment Company Institute has named elected Eric J. Pan as its next president and chief executive officer, the mutual funds and ETF research and advocacy organization said Tuesday.
Pan is a veteran regulator who directed international regulatory policy for the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Since January, Pan has been a managing director at Rock Creek Global Advisors LLC, a Washington-based international economic policy advisory firm.
Pan will be the 10th chief executive in the 80-year history of ICI. As president and CEO, Pan will direct ICI’s staff of 174 in offices in Washington, DC, London, and Hong Kong.
He succeeds Paul Schott Stevens, who is retiring at year-end after more than 16 years as ICI’s president and CEO.
“Eric Pan’s global experience, deep financial and regulatory insight, and a strong commitment to investor protection and service uniquely qualify him to lead ICI into its ninth decade,” ICI Chairman George C. W. Gatch, CEO of J.P. Morgan Asset Management, said in a statement. “The Board is confident that he will continue to advance the strong organization that Paul Stevens helped build and lead it to navigate the new challenges and opportunities ahead.”
Deep background in regulatory policy
A graduate of Harvard College, the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard Law School, Pan has made his mark both as a regulator and an academic.
He was recruited to the SEC in 2011, charged with leading a new unit to oversee international regulatory policy and implement the agency’s response to the G20 Leaders’ agenda in the wake of the global financial crisis.
In that role, he oversaw the SEC’s participation in the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) and Financial Stability Board (FSB).
In 2015, Pan moved to the CFTC, where as director of the Office of International Affairs he supervised all CFTC international initiatives. He represented the Commission in bilateral and multilateral negotiations as well as in IOSCO and the FSB, chairing the IOSCO Committee on Derivatives, the OTC Derivatives Regulators Group, and the FSB working group on data standards governance.
He also assisted the CFTC Chairman in chairing the IOSCO Cyber Task Force and the IOSCO Task Force on Market Fragmentation.
From 2005 to 2010, Pan was director of the Heyman Center on Corporate Governance and associate professor of law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, publishing research on financial regulation, international coordination, and corporate law.
He returned briefly to academia in the fall of 2019, spending a semester as senior research fellow and adjunct associate professor at Columbia Law School and its Center for Law and Economics Studies. Pan began his career as an associate at Covington & Burling in Washington.
Pan will become ICI’s president and CEO effective November 9.
With more than 20 years serving financial markets, John Sullivan is the former editor-in-chief of Investment Advisor magazine and retirement editor of ThinkAdvisor.com. Sullivan is also the former editor of Boomer Market Advisor and Bank Advisor magazines, and has a background in the insurance and investment industries in addition to his journalism roots.
