Richard Torrenzano is chairman and chief executive of The Torrenzano Group, a strategic communications firm specializing in building and protecting corporate reputations and enhancing shareholder value. The firm provides strategic communications, investor relations, transaction communications, and crisis management for corporations and organizations facing significant change or challenges.

During his long and distinguished career, Mr. Torrenzano has counseled chief executives, boards of major international corporations in the United States, Europe and Latin America as well as several heads of state.

He has extensive hands-on experience in the world’s financial markets. For nearly a decade at the New York Stock Exchange, he was a member of the Big Board’s management (policy) and executive (operations) committees and senior vice president.

Through a period of rapidly developing public policy issues, historic levels of market activity, unprecedented change in world affairs and intense global media coverage, he was responsible for planning and directing the NYSE’s external programs and activities.

A recognized global expert in crisis management, at the NYSE Mr. Torrenzano led one of the largest – and what was widely perceived as the most effective – communications and public policy staffs of any financial institution in the world. He managed the public policy and communications strategies for the two most significant global financial crises since the Great Depression: the market crash of ’87 and the $4 billion recapitalization of Long-Term Capital Management by a consortium of 14 of the world’s largest financial institutions.

Mr. Torrenzano also developed and implemented public strategies to deal with other significant market moments including: insider trading scandals, corporate governance and shareholder activists, bankruptcies, regulatory and disciplinary actions and program trading, as well as hundreds of corporate mergers and acquisitions. He also served as the Big Board’s chief spokesman and created the NYSE Television and Radio Networks, which provide the exchange with daily global media coverage.

Coupling his ability to shape and articulate public issues with a global view, he represented the NYSE in more than 40 countries.

At the request of the President of the United States following the Bush-Gorbachev Malta Summit, Mr. Torrenzano was instrumental in negotiating and planning the 1990 NYSE USSR-US Moscow seminar on financial markets, which was attended by top academic, business, financial and government leaders in the Soviet Union. This program served as a catalyst for the opening of new exchanges there and in St. Petersburg.

He was also part of the delegation earlier that year that advised the key political and business leaders of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland on the transition to capitalism and opening of financial markets in those countries.

Mr. Torrenzano negotiated and planned the historic 1986 China-US symposium on financial markets in Beijing. That meeting – with senior corporate and government executives participating – galvanized the opening of stock exchanges in Shanghai and elsewhere in China.