The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently announced that director of the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE) Marc Wyatt will leave the agency after more than five years of service to return to the private sector.
Pete Driscoll, OCIE’s chief risk and strategy officer, succeeds Wyatt as acting director. Driscoll joined the SEC in 2001 as a staff attorney in the Division of Enforcement at the Chicago regional office and eventually went on to serve as the OCIE’s managing executive from 2013 to early 2016.
Since joining the commission in December 2012, Wyatt has served as a senior specialized examiner with the SEC and co-founded the Private Fund Unit within OCIE. In October 2014, he was named deputy director and served as acting director in April 2015 before being named director in November of that year.
“OCIE has benefited greatly from Marc’s leadership and vision,” SEC acting Chairman Michael Piwowar said in a press release. “His efforts on enhancing our risk based exam program and the organizational changes he has put in place will leave a lasting mark on the Commission.”
“It has been an honor to serve alongside the outstanding OCIE team who work tirelessly to improve compliance, prevent fraud, monitor risk, and inform policy,” Wyatt said in the press release. “I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the Commissioners and staff across the SEC to execute on our mission.”
Under Wyatt’s watch, the commission has significantly increased its examinations, including over 2,400 examinations in fiscal year 2016, a 20 percent increase over fiscal year 2015 and a seven year high in examinations conducted; completed a reallocation of resources within the examination program that, along with focused hiring, resulted in increasing the size of the investment adviser and investment company examination staff by more than 20 percent as compared to the prior year in response to rapid industry growth by the end of fiscal year 2016; created the Office of Risk and Strategy, combining quantitative teams and risk professionals across OCIE into a single unit to increase technology-based approaches to identify risks among SEC registrant populations; formed the FINRA and Securities Industry Oversight Team (FSIO) to enhance oversight of a key industry self-regulatory organization; and established the Technology Controls Program (TCP) and its “cyberwatch” unit to monitor for significant events and outages related to regulation systems compliance and integrity, according to the release.
A chartered financial analyst, Wyatt worked as a principal and senior portfolio manager for a global multi-strategy hedge fund, prior to joining the SEC. He was a senior investment banker in the U.S. and U.K. before that.