Title: Vice President, Public Finance
Firm: Build America Mutual
Age: 30
Gia Calabrese is credited with spearheading dramatic growth in Build America Mutual’s insured healthcare portfolio over the past two years, the latest accomplishment in a career that started in 2015, her first year out of Duke University.
“I was a public policy major,” she said. Her studies focused on the regulatory environment at different levels of government, providing “the perfect segue into munis.” Calabrese realized during her interview at BAM “how relatable everything I’d learned in school was to the job.”
After a two-year stint in BAM’s rotational analyst program, during which she spent a few months in each group in the company, Calabrese joined the east regional group as an associate. There, she was a generalist, underwriting everything from airports to broadband.
Calabrese is currently vice president in the not-for-profit healthcare section, working with Martin Arrick, BAM’s head of health care. She played a key role in the growth of the company’s insured health care portfolio to more than $2 billion outstanding across over 60 credits since the middle of 2022.
Calabrese said the build-up in health care was made possible after S&P Global Ratings updated its financial model to reduce capital requirements for the sector that had previously made it cost prohibitive to provide the insurance, even to high-quality issuers.
She attributed her own rise within BAM to the support and encouragement she got from management.
“The special thing about BAM is having access to people like Martin and [CEO] Seán McCarthy from a really young age,” she said.