Ron Forbes has a reputation on Wall Street – a reputation for turning out top-notch investment bankers, especially public finance specialists – and it has spread halfway around the world.

       Forbes, who is a professor of finance at the School of Business and has taught at the University since 1970, has a passion for finance. “Professor Forbes is, hands down, one of the best teachers I’ve ever had,” says Victoria Smith, M.B.A.’97. “Part of what makes him so good is that he really loves the business, and that’s contagious.” 
     Ironically, Forbes has never worked on Wall Street himself. Since earning his Ph.D. in finance at the University at Buffalo in 1968, he has devoted his entire professional career to teaching, first at the School of Management at UB and then at Albany. He has also presented numerous professional development programs for investment banks and serves on the boards of several mutual funds. 
     “I really do enjoy my work,” Forbes says. “I’m free to explore and learn new technology and concepts in the fast-changing financial markets, and I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have worked with so many outstanding people — first as students and now as alumni and friends.” 
     Those alumni friends make up an astonishing network in the world of public finance. “Wall Street is very elite,” says Kimberly Welsh, M.B.A.’89, a vice president with PaineWebber’s municipal investment banking division. “Ron has done a phenomenal job of breaking through that elitism. There are now dozens of Albany alums in prominent positions on Wall Street, and they’ve formed their own network through Ron.” Smith, now an investment banker with First Albany Corp. who daily deals with rating agencies, bond insurers, financial advisers, and clients who are issuing bonds, agrees. “It’s striking that, on any given deal, I may come across other people who have come through the Albany program. This is a tremendous resource in learning the business and in dealing with the people within the community.”  
     Michael Borys, B.S.’78, M.B.A.’79, is a good example of how the network functions. A vice president in the municipal finance department of Goldman Sachs, Borys says the very fact that so many Albany graduates had done well on Wall Street encouraged him to pursue public finance.   “In the municipal bond area, people from Albany are viewed as more knowledgeable, more technically competent and as having a better work ethic than some of the graduates of more prestigious schools,” he says. “I was not a particularly good interviewer, but I was hired by someone I worked with while working for Ron. They had a chance to see me in action, not just in an interview.” Borys has returned the favor many times.  
       “I have often called Ron to find out whom he’s been working with. Sometimes I have been able to get the person a job; other times I have tried to steer them in the right direction or give them advice. It pays off for them, because they get honest advice and introductions to people who can help them get started, and it pays off for us, because we get an opportunity to hire some very talented individuals.” 
     A key element in the development of this network is Forbes’s teaching. “Ron was tough on his students — tough, but fair,” says Welsh. “That’s why we succeed.” 
     Forbes, who earned his A.B. degree in economics at Dartmouth College, is more modest.  “For whatever reason,” he says, “we have attracted some outstanding people to our program. Our job has been to simply help them become the best that they can be — and that they’ve done, all on their own.” 
     Barry Valentinsen, M.B.A.’97, gives Forbes more credit than that, though. He came to the School of Business after working in state government for about 15 years. Now he’s an assistant vice president of Public Resources Advisory Group, a financial advisor in New York City. “There was always a strong emphasis on fundamental concepts and skills in Forbes’s seminar,” he says. “He gave students the opportunity to work on real problems, and he forced them to think — to learn how to learn. The way he structured his class forced us to find out what we needed to know, what questions to ask, then how to find the answers. The way business changes, this capacity to adapt and innovate where necessary keeps me ahead of the curve.”  
     The alumni network and Forbes’s personal reputation reach so far that, early in 1995, he was asked to participate in a comprehensive program to establish a municipal finance system in the Czech Republic. Richard Kezer, a retired executive who spent 40 years in public sector finance, was working for the Urban Institute under the auspices of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. “One feature of USAID’s Housing Guaranty program was a mechanism that would let money flow into the Czech Republic to be available to commercial banks for lending to local governments for housing-related projects,” says Kezer. “But most of the infrastructure that we take for granted in the U.S. — the laws, procedures for borrowing, methods of repayment, accounting, and budgeting practices — did not yet exist in the Czech Republic.” The Urban Institute stepped in to train bankers in sound municipal lending practices. “We asked Ron Forbes to be part of the training team because he is so closely identified with the subject of municipal finance,” says Kezer. 
     Working from information gathered at a May, 1995 conference of public finance professionals and Czech bankers, lawyers, and government representatives, Forbes and Kezer developed case studies to be used as teaching tools. To make the materials most relevant to the people they were training, the Americans incorporated Czech accounting practices, balance sheets, and sources of revenue into the cases, gathering information from other Americans who were working with local Czech governments, as well as Czech government officials, bankers, and ministries. The two-and-a-half-day seminar, taught in Prague in January 1996, was such a success that Forbes and Kezer have now put on about a half -a-dozen similar programs at various Czech banks. “We design each seminar to meet the needs of the particular institution,” says Forbes. “We’ve trained nearly 200 people, including branch managers, lending officers, and people from the credit, credit policy and legal departments.” In January 1997, they put on a seminar for the finance committee of the Union of Towns and Cities, a body similar to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, on what it would take to establish a credit rating system in the Czech Republic 
      “The initial work in developing Czech finance cases was challenging,” says Forbes. “We were learning the nuances of Czech finance and accounting and also attempting to understand Czech bankers’ attitudes toward risk and risk management. It has been satisfying to see, on our return visits, that many of the concepts we developed during our seminars are already being used in lending decisions.”  
     Vladimir Stadnyk M.B.A.’78, executive managing director at Standard & Poor’s, says Forbes offered him an opportunity he might not otherwise have gotten. “I got my first job in New York City on the basis of a project I worked on with Ron’s municipal finance study group,” says Stadnyk. “I wasn’t the brightest student in my class, but he gave me a chance to work with his group, because I was willing to work hard.” Now it seems that Forbes is part of something bigger – giving people a chance to help a newly re-established country get itself onto firm financial ground. He’s still opening up opportunities, but now it’s on a larger scale.