Kimberly Salinas

I've been in petroleum finance for about 13 years, and I'm currently a managing director at Legato Capital Advisors. I started out doing downstream work because I studied chemical engineering, and while it's very interesting and more deterministic, I wanted to be closer to the wellhead. I found that a lot of decisions are made when you're in petroleum finance that are very influential to the market, and I thought that was just interesting to kind of be there, sort of alongside several C-suite boards, and see how they run companies and what makes a place successful and the decisions behind the directions companies are taken. It's significantly more business-oriented, and maybe that's how working at my dad's small business kind of influenced the decision to be in a more business-oriented but STEM-based role. Before this, I was a VP at U.S. Bank - though for the record, that's not an impressive title since in banking they call everyone VPs. In my current role, we're approached by several clients at any number of times, and as a petroleum engineer, I look through their data to assess the collateral value of what they're looking to finance. When I joined my current firm, we had just a few people reaching out to us, and now we are absolutely swamped, though I think a lot of that might be market influence and I don't want to take full credit.