Since 1994, Andy Altahawi has operated at the junction of two professions — an international attorney by training and an investment banker by trade — and it is that double history the foundation’s law and finance scholarships are built on.
The attorney
Mr. Altahawi trained in the law — graduating in 1986 and gaining admission to the bar in 1988 — and has practiced internationally throughout his career: corporate and commercial matters, cross-border structuring, and the legal work that surrounds companies moving between jurisdictions. He later added a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Szeged, the academic bridge between his two professions. He is an international non-U.S. attorney; throughout his career, matters touching U.S. law have been handled in coordination with U.S.-admitted attorneys — a co-counsel discipline that remains the rule of his practice today.
The investment banker — Wall Street, 1994
In 1994 he entered the U.S. securities industry, joining the investment banking ranks of Prudential Securities, where he served from 1994 to 1998, worked on corporate finance transactions, and held the FINRA registrations of the trade. Those years taught the craft that would define the decades after: how companies are financed, how offerings are built, and how a transaction actually reaches the market.
The operational history that followed
- 1994–1998 — Investment banking at Prudential Securities on Wall Street.
- 1998–2007 — Builds and leads his own investment bank, Adamson Brothers, an SEC- and FINRA-registered broker-dealer.
- 2007–present — Three decades of cumulative cross-border legal and capital markets work, culminating in today’s listing advisory practice for companies entering NASDAQ and NYSE.
A record that was clean from the start
Throughout its operation as a FINRA-registered broker-dealer, Adamson Brothers was never the subject of a customer complaint or a regulatory citation from FINRA or the NASD — a clean record across a decade of multi-office trading, market making, and corporate finance. Mr. Altahawi’s own registered career from 1994 was likewise free of customer complaints. His full regulatory history, including the 2018–2019 SEC Longfin matter resolved by consent without admitting or denying the allegations, is published in full at andyaltahawi.com/record.
The investment banking career is told here in the past tense, because that is what it is — history. What continues from it is judgment: the way a lawyer who has priced deals reads a transaction, and the way a market veteran who has drafted for foreign jurisdictions reads a structure.
What this chapter gives the foundation
The Altahawi Scholarship in Law honors the profession where the career began; the finance awards honor the trade learned on Wall Street. Both exist so that a student with the same talent and less luck gets the same start.