Witad Awards 2019 Write-Ups: Legal/Compliance Professional of the Year—Miranda Morad, MarketAxess

MarketAxess’ Miranda Morad takes home the title of legal/compliance professional of the year at the 2019 Women in Technology & Data Awards. As general counsel for both Europe and Asia, she oversees all regulatory, legal and compliance matters for the firm’s electronic bond trading platform and its subsidiary and regulatory solutions provider, Trax. 

Morad’s expertise in regulation has helped the firm and its clients comply with Mifid II’s various tenets, as well as their preparations for the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation and Central Securities Depositories Regulation. She has also helped the firm grow in the Asia-Pacific region, working with the Monetary Authority of Singapore to secure approval for MarketAxess to function as a recognized market operator in Singapore.

Morad says the work she does is intellectually stimulating, varied and rewarding. “I’m working in a time of extraordinary regulatory and political flux in Europe and in an industry that is increasingly complex from a regulatory perspective,” she says. She admits that getting to where she is has not been an easy ride. “I went back to square one several times,” she says. In her second year after qualifying as a litigation lawyer in the UK, she immigrated to Israel, learned Hebrew, qualified as a lawyer there, and started her career again, this time in private equity. “I took my Israeli bar exams when my second child was eight months old,” Morad explains. “After eight years, I returned to the UK with two toddlers and a third on the way. To help pay the bills, I had to go back to work soon after my third child was born. It was 2007, just before the financial crisis.” 

Morad found private practice unforgiving, so she started her career again as an in-house lawyer, this time in the financial services industry. It is here where she found she could achieve her potential and add value. Though she had to learn from scratch how the industry functioned, she realized that it was only a matter of time, experience and application before she was able to fully understand it.

Morad owes much of her success to several individuals that have influenced her throughout her career, including Ashok Chandrasekhar from Goldfarb Seligman in Israel; Peter Martin, who worked with her at Berwin Leighton Paisner; and her current boss, mentor and sponsor, Scott Pintoff, global general counsel of MarketAxess. But the biggest influence on her professional career and life in general, she says, is her father who taught her one rule, which she believes is essential for any lawyer: Never, ever, compromise your integrity.