Photo by Audra Melton

Every day, in her role as the director of the Atlanta Regional Office of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Nekia Hackworth Jones (MBA 2003) stands in the breach between the $100 trillion in securities traded on U.S. equity markets and the bad actors who would break the public’s trust in those markets and potentially crash the economy.

“We really want to protect the people who interact with, and rely on, the markets,” says Jones. “That could be a veteran, a teacher, or anyone who has their life savings invested in a 401K or IRA. It could be people like my mom and dad, who are both retired and who can have financial security in their golden years because their finances were managed well. It could be a young person buying their first stock. It could be a small-business owner needing capital. If those people couldn’t trust how the markets work, then we’d be in a tough space.”

Jones and her staff in the SEC’s Atlanta office manage the enforcement, examinations, and business operations for five states: Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama. Along with SEC headquarters in Washington, D.C., and 10 other regional offices, staff is responsible for monitoring the securities markets and approximately 28,000 registered entities and individuals that interact with those markets, to make sure they’re complying with federal securities laws.

“If we believe a person or a company has run afoul of the federal securities laws, it’s up to our enforcement division to investigate and bring a lawsuit, if necessary,” says Jones. “In terms of compliance, our examinations division teams go out and review the financial books of registered individuals and entities, making sure they’re compliant with federal securities laws. But we’re also answering questions and identifying areas for improvement. We try to work with them to fix issues.”

The SEC can also rely on its hugely effective Whistleblower Program, which has paid more than $1.3 billion in awards to individuals who have reported violations of federal securities laws within their organizations. “You need multiple eyes and ears on the ground when you’re in a regulatory capacity,” says Jones. “Often, the people who are going to be most knowledgeable are the people who are living it day to day. We try to have presence in as many places as we can, to increase the chances that individual actors are inclined and incentivized to do the right thing.”

Beyond regulating the region’s financial industry, Jones and her team are engaged with educating the public to increase financial literacy. They do this with online resources, calculators, and legal guidance for investing and small business financing, as well as offering special workshops and public events on financial topics. “It’s a huge part of what we do every day,” she says. “We have a critical mass of Americans—around 60 million—who don’t even actively use a bank account. So, in addition to monitoring and regulating these sophisticated entities and markets, we try to educate people about the basic principles of personal financial management, so they understand all the tools available to them to secure a strong financial future. Then, once they’re ready to invest or borrow or raise capital, they will trust the markets are working as they should. It’s like two covers of a big book.”

That continued faith in the markets is what drives Jones. “It’s what I hope my impact will be,” she says. “The market crash in the 1920s, the recession in 2008—we know what can happen when people lose faith in the markets. That’s why we’re all here working really hard to earn and to keep the public’s trust.”

No one is perhaps better suited for the task than Jones, whose passion for both law and business set her on an unlikely path to the SEC. “My career wasn’t linear,” says Jones, adding that she’d wanted to be a lawyer from the age of eight. “I’ve had a lot of unexpected twists and turns.” While preparing to attend law school, Jones discovered business classes as an undergraduate at Emory University and was hooked. “I fell in love with the qualitative aspects, the judgment calls, strategy, and investing. I also loved the quantitative side. I ended up being an accounting major.”

Jones worked for a year after graduation for Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) before heading to Harvard Law School. “I never planned to be in business long-term, but I looked at it as an asset to becoming a lawyer who is comfortable with numbers,” she says. Once at law school, Jones immediately “missed talking about corporate strategy and hearing lectures by business leaders. When someone suggested applying to business school, I said, ‘That’s an option?’ So, in my first year of law school at Harvard, I applied to HBS and got in. It was life-changing. HBS made my entire experience.”

Jones’s career took off after earning a doctorate degree in law along with her MBA. She worked in both private law firms and in public service roles, at one time clerking for New York federal judge Sterling Johnson Jr., who told her working for the public was “the best job you could have—a way to give back,” she says. “That clerkship opened my eyes to the benefits and virtues of public service.” She would later serve with the U.S. Department of Justice, first as a federal prosecutor and then as an assistant deputy attorney general working on financial fraud investigations. “So now I’ve come full circle in a way that far exceeds my expectations,” says Jones.

But there’s no resting on her laurels. As an African-American woman, Jones is actively engaged in expanding and embedding a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) wherever she goes. “Just as I view being a lawyer as a calling, and my public service as a calling, I view my commitment to DEI as a calling,” she says. “I’m very proud that, at every place I’ve worked, including the SEC, they have been equally committed. By my presence, I am showing why DEI matters. I do my best to be vocal, where, when, and how I can.”

Jones also makes a point of mentoring young people, including people of color, to empower them to be successful as well. “I am doing the things that were modeled for me as a young person growing up in southwest Atlanta. I knew if I had the good fortune of getting a college education and becoming a lawyer, it was incumbent upon me to lift up others as I was climbing, and I was going to give back in every way that I could.”

Post a Comment