Pakistani American Saira Malik Named Chief Information Officer of Asset Management Firm Nuveen

Pakistani American Saira Malik has been named chief information officer of asset management firm Nuveen, a wholly-owned subsidiary of financial planning firm TIAA. In this role, she “drives the weekly market and investment insights and delivers client asset allocation views from across the firm’s investment teams,” according to a company press release.

Malik also leads the Global Investment Committee (GIC), “bringing together Nuveen’s most senior investment leaders to deliver the best thinking and actionable portfolio allocation ideas for our clients across institutional and wealth channels,” the press release said. As chair of the Equities Investment Council (EIC), she authors a quarterly market commentary. Additionally, she is the lead portfolio manager for “the $120 plus billion CREF Stock strategy and a listed portfolio manager for over $30 billion CREF Growth and over $20 billion CREF Global Equities strategies. She also serves as the sole manager of a $5 billion global equity portfolio.”

Before being named CIO, she was head of global equities portfolio management, and before that, head of global equities research. Previously, she was with JP Morgan Asset Management, where her roles included vice president/small-cap growth portfolio manager and equity research analyst.

She graduated with a BS in Economics from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and an MS in Finance from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She frequently appears on financial news networks such as CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox Business. Malik has been profiled in Kiplinger’s and Barron’s, which ranked her among the top 100 most influential women in US finance.

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Daughter of immigrants from Pakistan, Malik grew up in Stockton, California where she attended Lincoln High School. “My parents are Pakistani immigrants. As a high-school senior, I was advised by a career counselor to skip university and go to community college”, she is quoted as saying on the Nuveen website.

She ignored the advice and went off to university instead, earning her series 7 and 63 registrations (investment broker licenses) by age 19. “After graduating, every Wall Street firm to which I applied rejected me,” she says. Then she earned a master’s in finance and “finally, a large firm” hired her. “It’s important to be persistent and it’s fine to reject bad advice,” she says. She mentions her grandmother, who was “among the first class of women admitted to medical school in India, graduating with an MD in 1934.” Her diploma hangs on a wall in Malik’s house. “It wasn’t written for a woman; it was written for a man. On it, administrators crossed out the preprinted words ‘him’ and ‘his’ and replaced them with handwritten ‘her’ and ‘hers.’ To this day, that diploma inspires the women in my family.”