Daniel Coleman

Daniel Coleman, a Birmingham resident with more than three decades of experience in finance and strong ties to BSC, took office as Birmingham-Southern College’s 16th president on Dec. 3, 2018.

Coleman, who was CEO of the global financial services firm KCG Holdings until its 2017 sale, was previously a member of the college’s Board of Trustees and is an adjunct professor of finance. He and his wife, Brooke, returned to their hometown with their three children in 2009 after more than a decade in the New York area. Coleman served on Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin’s transition team and remains the co-chair of the mayor’s financial advisory team, working to improve the city’s management of its finances. He has also served on the boards of the Alabama Symphony Endowment and of Build Up, an innovative early-college workforce development program centered in the Ensley neighborhood.

Coleman played a leading role in the evolution of automated trading in global financial markets. Until its 2017 sale to Virtu Financial, New York-based KCG was a leader in the securities and financial services industry, Before KCG, Coleman was CEO of GETCO, a privately-held automated trading firm based in Chicago. Prior to that, he worked for 24 years for UBS and its predecessor firms, ending up as global head of equities for UBS Investment Bank.

In addition to the boards of KCG and GETCO, Coleman’s past corporate board memberships include NASDAQ Inc., the Options Clearing Corporation, and the Boston Options Exchange.

Coleman entered the world of finance as an option clerk after earning a BA in English at Yale. He earned his MBA at the University of Chicago while trading convertible bonds. After moving to New York in 1996, he moved into management positions for a predecessor of UBS. He rose to head of global equities there; from 2005 through 2010, he oversaw a business that remained profitable through the recession, included the world’s leading cash equities execution business and equity research department, and handled global equity derivatives, global prime brokerage, and more.

From there, he moved on to Chicago-based market maker GETCO, first as global head of client services and equity trading and then as CEO, replacing the retiring founders in 2012. In that role, he expanded the business beyond its core of automated market making and led a merger with competitor Knight Capital Group.

Engineering the merger and integration of Knight Capital Group and GETOC Holdings to form KCG, President Coleman helped create the leading trader of equities in the United States and one of the leading securities trading firms in the world. While integrating trading platforms, back offices, and corporate cultures, he and his managing team raised debt, shed assets, cuts costs, and returned more than $500 million to shareholders. With the sale of the company four years after its creation, shareholders who bought the stock at the company’s inception enjoyed a nearly 100% cumulative return.

Upon completion of the deal, Coleman returned to Birmingham full time; he had been commuting to New York and Chicago. In that time, as well as working with the mayor’s office, he has served as an advisor to the Security Industry Financial Markets Association. He joined the BSC Business Administration Department as an adjunct professor, teaching three courses in finance, and he has taken courses at BSC in the computer programming language Python and in calculus, working alongside some of his own students.