The Investment Association (IA) has appointed Tom Stephens, global co-head of ETF capital markets at JP Morgan Asset Management (JPMAM), as chair of the ETF committee.
Rajat Tiwari, iShares EMEA global markets at BlackRock, will take on Stephens’ previous role as deputy chair of the ETF committee.
Stephens (pictured) replaces Keshava Shastry, former global head of capital markets at DWS, who left the German asset manager last month, ETF Stream revealed.
Stephens joined JPMAM in 2017 as international head of ETF capital markets.
Prior to this, he worked at the Société Générale Corporate and Investment Banking as head of ETF execution sales, joining from BlackRock’s ETF product management team.
Stephens has been deputy chair of the IA’s ETF committee since 2020.
Galina Dimitrova, director, investment and capital markets at the IA, said “We would like to thank Keshava Shastry for his time and dedication to taking forward the work of the ETF committee.
“We look forward to benefiting from the expertise of our new chair and deputy chair, Tom Stephens and Rajat Tiwari, as we tackle the key challenges and opportunities for ETFs, a growing and innovative area of the funds market.”
The IA’s ETF committee was founded in late 2016 to discuss key issues related to the ecosystem such as regulation and market structure.
In 2021, the IA added more than 530 ETFs to its sector categories, increasing the number of strategies featured across the IA’s 52 sector categories to 4,100.
Adding ETFs to the sector classification system boosted their visibility and comparability, with financial advisers able to directly compare ETFs against active funds and index trackers.
