Kate Wormald

Kate has advised and represented a large cross-section of the alternative asset management community over the past 24 years, since founding Oesa in 2002. She has also been engaged as a legal and regulatory consultant by Ernst and Young, as well as by large pension funds, a well-known charitable trust, industrial corporates, and proprietary trading houses, all of whom required specialist legal advice in relation to their trading and derivative documentation.

Kate qualified as a barrister but decided to pursue a career in the City as a sales and trading lawyer specialising in derivatives, prime brokerage, and complex structured products. She gained invaluable experience in-house at several large financial institutions during the innovative period of the 1990s, including Daiwa Securities, Salomon Brothers (now Citi), and then Goldman Sachs, where she headed up the Prime Brokerage and the European Capital Markets legal teams that encompassed all the derivative trading activity for EMEA and Hong Kong.

Kate’s advice at all of these institutions was integral to the development of a vast array of new, innovative financial products. In addition, she contributed to the many industry initiatives to standardise documentation and product definitions which are now the main stay of the derivative industry, including the ISDA Master Agreement and CSA/CSD, Master Confirmations including Equities, Bonds, CDS, & FX, the  FIA and FOA ETD agreements, Clearing documents and the GMRA/MRA and GMSLA.

Prior to setting up Oesa, Kate was a consultant to the then FSA and was one of the original authors of the Market Abuse Code and the Wholesale Money Markets Code of Conduct.

Kate’s wealth of experience is unmatched today in the alternative asset manager space.