Daiman Baker
Daiman started his professional life as a lawyer in the entertainment industry in his native Los Angeles, California. His experience in entertainment was at a record label, a television production company and a movie studio. This work was more focused on intellectual property issues: drafting compilation, licensing and talent contracts; analyzing and summarizing rights that the studio held in various production contracts, enabling company executives to sell these assets to other movie studios.
He then managed various legal matters at two internet start-ups and a family-owned telecoms consulting company. His work at the start-ups covered negotiating and drafting website development and maintenance contracts, investor and strategic affiliation contracts, content licensing, stock option and corporate employment/separation agreements. His work at the telecoms company entailed negotiating, drafting and editing all contracts; among them were commercial leases, architect and general contractor agreements.
Daiman then moved to France and attended the HEC MBA program just outside Paris. During his business school studies, he secured a summer internship at Barclays Capital on the structured solutions desk in London. His legal skills were leveraged to help the 25-member team create and sell bespoke derivative-based solutions to myriad clients; among them pension funds, insurance companies and private banks/distributors. Daiman returned to the desk upon graduation from the HEC MBA program and continued for another year.
After solution sales, Daiman further leveraged his legal skills and product knowledge to join the compliance department. He enjoyed many successes in compliance at Barcap, including rapid promotion and being appointed the liaison between Barcap compliance and Barclays Group compliance, spreading best practice and liaising with the heads of compliance for all six Barclays Group business units.
Daiman then joined Deutsche Bank to help build their retail structured products control framework. He worked with business, legal and compliance colleagues to set up, refine and oversee the control framework; this included product and marketing material review and approvals, due diligence on potential distribution partners and negotiating the agreements between Deutsche and the distributors. These distributors were based in the UK and across Europe.
Wanting to round out his banking experience and move to a more senior and generalist role, Daiman accepted a business supervision role with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. There he was responsible for overseeing supervision and control issues for the global co-head of fixed income sales, her direct reports and all subordinate supervisors; such issues were regulatory, legal, operational and governance in nature. He identified potential issues and put in place or refined business processes that enhanced the control framework for a USD2billion sales function.
Relevant achievements at BAML were the successful monitoring of supervision issues for 30+ MDs in EMEA fixed income sales; drafting a 112 page cross-functional reference guide that was rolled out to 300+ sales people across the region (the guide was the first of its kind and the basis for other such publications used globally) and being the most active member of the team in recruiting university grads, MBAs and diverse candidates.
This work experience, educational background and achievements highlight Daiman’s profile as a risk-focused professional with experience in various industries in the US and UK, across many different types of business-related risk, his ability to understand a variety of functions within organizations of diverse size and his excellent people and recruitment skills.
