Angela Leyesa is Senior Principal Consultant at Waystone Compliance Solutions with over 15 years of compliance experience and is located in the Chicago office. At Waystone, Angela uses her expertise in investment advisory compliance, leading client engagements and consulting on completions of compliance manuals, annual filings, training, research, conducting annual reviews of compliance programmes and facilitation of regulatory examinations. Angela works with a variety of advisory firms including, RIAs, CPOs/CTAs, family offices and quantitative trading firms.
Previously, Angela primarily served as in-house compliance officer for a variety of financial services firms, including those on the buy and sell sides. Most recently, Angela was a Senior Compliance Associate for Loop Capital, an investment bank, brokerage and investment advisory firm, where she primarily supported the municipal underwriting business, ensuring compliance with applicable SEC, FINRA and MSRB rules and regulations. Angela also provided compliance support to an affiliated, registered investment adviser, focusing on infrastructure investments.
Angela began her career as a member of the market regulation department at the Chicago Board of Trade and remained through the merger with CME Group. As a Senior General Investigator, Angela was responsible for collecting, researching, and analysing case data for potential violations of exchange rules and regulations, preparing reports and recommendations to be presented to the exchange disciplinary committee, and mentoring junior investigators. Subsequently, Angela accepted the role of Compliance Officer at Citadel, serving on the investment advisory compliance team as a compliance generalist. Angela was part of the team responsible for completing Citadel’s registration with the SEC as an investment adviser and establishing Citadel’s initial RIA compliance programme. In her role at Citadel, Angela also served as the liaison between compliance and technical resources in defining and developing technology solutions to support regulatory compliance monitoring.
Following Citadel, Angela joined GETCO (eventually, KCG), a high-frequency trading firm, as a Compliance Officer, supporting the electronic market-making business across multiple asset classes including equities, options, futures, FI. Eventually, Angela served as CCO of the business, ensuring compliance with applicable requirements of equity, option and futures exchanges, the SEC and FINRA. Finally, Angela also served as a Compliance Officer for Achievement Asset Management, the hedge fund that broke away from Peak6, assisting in instituting a stand-alone RIA compliance programme subsequent to the split and led efforts to develop and implement surveillance reporting and technology to assist in the administration and monitoring of the compliance programme.
Angela holds a Bachelor of Science in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, and a Master of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering, from Illinois Institute of Technology. Previously, Angela held the Series 7, 24, and 52 licenses.
