Bart Livolsi

Bart Livolsi, whose 45-year career in public finance included thousands of financings that touched nearly every corner of the country, is proud of the physical infrastructure those billions of bonds built.

For Livolsi, who spent 36 of those years at Citigroup beginning at its predecessor, Smith Barney, said the value of the municipal bond market is the tangibility of what it finances.

“It’s not stock offerings, it’s not hedge funds or private equity,” he said. “It’s really building infrastructure and being able to touch and see what your financings accomplish.” 

Livolsi was a key contributor to Citigroup’s significant growth during his tenure. A results-oriented leader, problem solver and trailblazer, Livolsi provided superior results for his clients, investors and employer, colleagues and friends said.

“Bart was a true innovator in municipal and infrastructure finance,” said Chris Chafizadeh, senior managing director and co-head of public finance at Assured Guaranty. “I had the pleasure of knowing him and working with him throughout my career, and I have the greatest respect for his work ethic, his resourceful and innovative ideas and his loyalty.”

Livolsi treated building business with people as top of mind.

“In the business, it’s who you know first and what you know second, and Bart was the master of getting to know people because of what a lovely man he is,” said Greg Carey, chairman of public finance at Goldman Sachs & Co. and co-head of the firm’s global sports finance business. “People could trust him and know they were in good hands.” Carey, a Bond Buyer 2023 Hall of Famer, worked with Livolsi at Citi until 2004 and credits him for his own successes in the business. 

“I had the great pleasure of working with him for more than 20 years,” Carey said, adding, their own relationship goes deeper than public finance. “He is the godfather of my son, he and his lovely wife, Julie, they are a part of my family.”

Livolsi’s career in public finance began in financial planning at Bache & Co., later acquired by Prudential.

He then was recruited by Smith Barney in 1980, where he became head of the Southeast region.

“In those days, if you wanted to be in the public finance business, Smith Barney was one of the premier places to be. They had great expertise. They had solid management, a good reputation,” Livolsi said. “And for guys like me, that were still relatively new in the business, that kind of an opportunity was pretty special.”

In 1988, Livolsi became head of the Eastern region for the next decade before becoming head of all regions in 1998.

“I went out, I recruited and created regional businesses throughout the country,” he said. “From California, Seattle, Texas, Florida, Philadelphia, New England, Chicago, Atlanta, I went out for years finding like-minded bankers who had good technical skills. It was easy to create a business where we treated it really like a partnership; people wanted to work closely together. They used the expertise of the product groups in New York and ended up being very successful.” 

Whether it was healthcare or transportation, airports or public power, the goal was “to make sure that the relationship bankers in the region also were very good technically and utilized all of the resources that a big organization had. And I spent a big chunk of my career organizing that.”

Livolsi moved on to head product groups in 2016, and in 2018, in his final year with Citi, was responsible for significant activity and use of public-private partnership technology in the world of infrastructure finance.

“I retired at 71 when I realized that getting on airplanes was getting harder and harder,” he said. “I’m very proud of the way we worked together. We had a philosophy of, wherever we went, we went there together. The goal was to make people comfortable that if they performed and worked hard, they’d be treated fairly and compensated for it.”

Livolsi’s advice to younger bankers in the industry is to obtain strong technical skills, but then realize the “biggest priority is to treat clients with respect, recognize how important they are, making them the most important part of your plan, make them feel comfortable that you’re going to do the right thing by them and utilize all the resources that your organization has.”

“To me, I think that is the key,” he added.

Livolsi also said Citi’s exit from the business late last year “was just shortsighted. They don’t recognize how significant and important the public finance business is to the United States.”

His son, Marc, also worked at Citi for 25 years as a managing director of underwriting, until his position was cut in February 2023, He now works for Assured.

“I think there’s a lot of runway left in the business,” Livolsi said.

Livolsi lives with his wife, Julie, in Florida. They have two children and four grandchildren.

Livolsi is a graduate of Iona University with a bachelor’s degree in business administration (1970) and a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in finance (1975) and sits on the school’s Board of Trustees. He is a veteran of the U.S. Navy.

Livolsi is on the board of Loggerhead Marine Life Center in Juno, Florida, the American Friends of Capodimonte Museum in Naples, Italy, and the POA of Eagle Tree Property Association in Jupiter, Florida.