ETF Central: Baron Capital Head of ETF Solutions Matt Camuso

**Bilal Little** (0:13)
Welcome to another edition of ETF Central. I'm your host, Bilal Little. I'm really excited about today's guest because the active ETF landscape is changing so rapidly. And we have Matt Camuso, the head of ETF solutions over at Baron Capital.
With that, Matt, welcome to the show.

**Matt Camuso** (0:28)
Thanks for having me.

**Bilal Little** (0:29)
Good to see you. Good to see you too, man. Is this your first time at the Exchange? This is. Come on.

**Matt Camuso** (0:33)
Especially in this amazing room you got here. This is quite the treat. After all these years, this is actually my first time here.

**Bilal Little** (0:40)
That's insane. We got to get you some time here. The Exchange is crazy, man. It's crazy.

**Matt Camuso** (0:44)
Just walk it in. The history behind it is awesome. Thanks for having me.

**Bilal Little** (0:48)
Yeah. Okay. We got to jump in. So Matt, this is important to me. I think every guest should tell their own story. I just want to hear from you how you got to Baron. You're an industry veteran. Obviously, you've been around at some very large shops.
But it's important just to hear from you, how you got to Baron and what you're doing in your role.

**Matt Camuso** (1:06)
Yeah. We had a session yesterday with our interns, and we did a, tell me about your career.
So this was timely to reflect on it. It's crazy how long it's been, and I'm just blessed to have found the ETF industry. So I started my career at State Street on the bank side. Amazing start, but quickly found my way to Spider ETF business in a sales job. So in 2012, roughly, that was my first entrance or introduction to the ETF wrapper, if you will.
Did that for a while and then got the opportunity to join JP Morgan and help them build their ETF business early on. Same thing at BNY, and really found my knack for not only helping our clients solve problems in their portfolios through our ETF solutions, but the knack for building a business inside of a large organization as they kind of evolve and migrate into this new wrapper. I'm very excited to now have joined BNY to do the same thing. We were talking about before we went live here, it's been about six months. So it's been a lot of fun. Time is already flying by, but the opportunity that this industry has brought to me personally, the relationships you very much included that I've been able to garner over that time has been amazing.
And I still think, as they say with the ETF industry, we're just getting started.

**Bilal Little** (2:23)
We are, man, we are. Look, it's still about people, right? So I think that's what's important. So talk a little bit about your role at Baron as head of ETF Solutions, and then maybe expand a little bit about who Baron Capital is.

**Matt Camuso** (2:36)
Sure, so head of ETF Solutions, as I try and put it simply, actually with the help of AI the other day, someone kept asking me, it was like this new title around the industry. I'm like, all right, here is everything I do. And with the evolution of AI actually helped out, really driving the commercial strategy for our ETF platform at Baron. So cross-functional role across product marketing, sales, and obviously capital markets, which is very important for ETFs.
This actually started when I was at JP Morgan for the first time, that we see all these firms coming to the industry. It's very important to have that expertise within the firm, especially when we're newer to ETFs. But you don't need, as we like to say, an army of people. So that's why I say cross-functional is almost a consultant for all of these existing business size within Baron Capital that have been very successful over the years to help when it comes to the ETF product set. So if you look at Baron from a firm history, 40 plus years of active growth investing, very well known, obviously our founder and CEO, Ron Baron, just an amazing individual, started the business back in 1982 with, I think, $1 million, has grown it to over $50 billion today.
Very well known for their mutual funds, but this was the next natural evolution. If you talk to Ron, this is the same thing I just said about the ETF industry, he says, we're still just getting started. Baron Capital is to be here for a very long time, and to do that, mutual funds are still very important, but it's about expanding our wrapper choice to clients, which includes ETFs, but also SMAs, CITs, and others. So again, 40 plus year track record, active growth investing under one very simple investment philosophy, bottoms up, research driven, fundamental investing, as some have coined it, old school, active management is what we've been known for.