Chris Perry - CEO, NewSouth Associates

Chris left a highly successful career on Wall Street to join NewSouth AssociatesNS as its CEO/Chairman in early 2004. In addition to his overarching responsibilities managing the ongoing operations of the company, Chris also leads engagements in the areas of management, marketing, and resource development. With an undergraduate degree in history from Vanderbilt University and an MBA from Northwestern University (where he majored in finance and accounting), Chris held management positions as Managing Director and Head of E-Commerce at HSBC, USA, and Senior Vice President for Taxed Fixable Income at Prudential Securities in both New York and London.

As a volunteer and an investment banker, Chris has been actively involved in raising money for eleemosynary institutions such as his college alma mater, Vanderbilt, and he has presided over two senior pastor search committees. Included among his more notable professional accomplishments have been pioneering the use of the Internet to sell new issue corporate bonds while at HSBC, designing a multi-currency multiple time zone fixed income application for HSBC’s global website, selecting the firm’s technology partners, obtaining all the internal approvals and negotiating the contracts with several E-commerce B2B platforms, building the emerging markets debt business for Prudential in London, developing a market for stripped 100-year corporate bonds, and leading the “Dare to Dream” stewardship campaign for his church in London. In particular, Chris brings a business-oriented perspective to schools and other eleemosynary clients for NewSouth AssociatesNS, especially as those clients move into a digital age. Chris’s professional history includes taking several organizations through the transition to a digital enterprise. In so doing, Chris has had extensive contact with vendors in the technology field, and has been able to translate technological innovation into reforming and improving Wall Street practices that had defied change for many years.

In the past year, Chris has made serving NewSouth and the Forsyth Country Day School community his life’s pursuit. In addition to his work as NewSouth’s CEO, Chris teaches economics, serves as an academic coach, and coaches basketball for Rusty LaRue’s AAU Titans organization.