Christopher R. O'Dea

Mr. O’Dea is a senior level executive with more than 20 years of international experience in strategic planning, business structuring and operations, business development, sales/marketing and communications in the financial services industry.

In the course of his career, Mr. O’Dea has develop extensive experience and contacts with key family office, wealth management and institutional groups in the EU and Middle East, as well as with the legal, regulatory and operational service providers supporting investment management businesses in those regions.

Mr. O’Dea has served in senior international development roles at Calamos Investments, where he established a new mutual fund business in Europe, and at Wanger Asset Management, L.P., where he built a successful business serving institutional and wealth management clients. During these assignments, he spent nearly 50% of his time in Europe working with clients, prospects, service providers and certain media. Mr. O’Dea has also worked on international development for Mesirow Financial.

Mr. O’Dea is a long-standing active member of the President’s Circle of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. He sponsored a CCGA Global Connections dinner that focused on the global pension crisis that is now causing upheaval in financial markets, and has hosted the Investment Company Institute’s annual conference of global securities regulators in Washington, D.C., brings together securities, investment fund and derivatives regulators from the world’s major markets.

During his career, Mr. O’Dea has been invited to speak at the Dublin Fund Industry Association annual conference, the ICI/IBA Global Mutual Funds Conference, Wall Street Journal Europe conferences in Boston and Amsterdam, as well as private industry venues.

Before moving into the investment profession, Mr. O’Dea was National Director of Field Operations with Coopers & Lybrand where he was responsible for major new business efforts in the US and coordination with global member firms of the C&L network on international proposals. Mr. O’Dea joined Coopers after a career in financial journalism, where he specialized in coverage of derivatives trading, managed futures and hedge funds, investment banking and private equity.