Clay Smith is an aviation financial professional with over 20 years of experience as a portfolio manager and a banker/broker.  He has successfully led early-stage company financings, corporate bond issuances, restructurings and bankruptcies, and structured credit transactions.  In his time as a fund manager, he was directly responsible for structured and distressed aviation assets worth over $1 billion.  He spent 11 years in senior asset management roles at AIG, American Express and Deephaven Capital Management.  In 2009, Smith joined R.W. Pressprich & Co. in order to cofound their aviation practice establishing its loan trading platform and overseeing the development of its aviation research and analytics group.

Smith holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Irvine, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California where he was a Hughes Fellow, and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago.  He also holds the CFA designation from the CFA Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia.