Romita Shetty
Managing Director
Lehman Brothers

Lehman Brothers, an innovator in global finance, serves the financial needs of corporations, governments and municipalities, institutional clients, and high net worth individuals worldwide. Founded in 1850, Lehman Brothers maintains leadership positions in equity and fixed income sales, trading and research, investment banking, private investment management, asset management and private equity.

Romita moved to the US from New Delhi in 1988 to get a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University. After graduating, she worked at Standard and Poors, JP Morgan Securities and RBS Greenwich Capital Markets, steadily rising to the top in each position. At RBS, she built out and co-headed the Structured Credit and Equity Markets business in North America and ran the global alternative investment products.

Since 2007 she has run Lehman Brothers' Global Special Opportunities group within the Fixed Income Division – the group focuses on making principal investments for the firm in a variety of sectors and across the entire capital structure. Romita is the highest ranked Asian woman at Lehman.

Romita’s success is laudable in the tough world of finance. A paucity of role models for Asian women and the demands of Wall Street on a working mother are major deterrents for most.

Her willingness to take risks, staying flexible and unruffled under pressure, all helped, she says. Also, with a great mentor who gave her “free reign to run as far as I wanted to go”, she took on the structured credit and derivatives world in its formative stage and excelled in it.

Romita also stresses the importance of being true to one’s self. Many times, Asian women tend to assume a personality they are not or go into a shell. With the former, you're likely to be unhappy, and with the latter, you're not going to be noticed, she says. “Make every effort to play up on your strengths. I stand out as memorable at events because I'm a woman." Even an accent, a different background and varied experiences, are all things to create positive power.

Even with the grueling demands of career, Romita has established truly impressive record of community work. She is a founding member of Sakhi for South Asian Women, a ground-breaking organization working on domestic violence issues. Romita was still in school when she helped start the organization in 1989. She has been a board member of the New York City Coalition of Battered Women Advocates and is currently on the board of CREA, a non-profit that works to build leadership skills and best practices among non-profits in developing countries. She is on the executive committee of South Asian Action Forum, was in the South Asians for Kerry effort and works to raise awareness around South Asian issues in the US.

Romita lives in New York City with her husband Nasser Ahmad and son Mikal, 4.


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