Media and Communications experts Wissam Kairouz, Managing Director at Morgan Stanley & Co.'s Leveraged & Acquisition Finance Group, and Harlan J. Wakoff, Managing Director in the firm’s Media and Communications Group, will deliver the opening keynote at the 2016 MFM CFO Summit, the Media Financial Management Association announced today.
Scheduled for February 25-26, 2015, at the W Fort Lauderdale Hotel, the MFM CFO Summit provides senior financial executives in media companies with the insights and tools they need to address the leadership, economic, technology, and regulatory challenges affecting the financial performance and future success of their companies.
The opening keynote by Morgan Stanley & Co.’s Wissam Kairouz and Harlan J. Wakoff will address the current credit market environment, the factors affecting broadcast industry performance and the trends shaping the industry’s future.
“Merger and acquisition activity has become a key focus for media businesses; Morgan Stanley’s Wissam Kairouz and Harlan Wakoff have been key architects in helping organizations develop and fund their M&A activities. Their insights will be the perfect way to open the MFM 2016 CFO Summit, the industry’s only forum designed exclusively for all of media’s most senior finance executives,” said Mary M. Collins, President and CEO of MFM and its BCCA subsidiary, the media industry’s credit association.
Wissam Kairouz serves as a Managing Director in Morgan Stanley & Co.’s Leveraged & Acquisition Finance Group in New York where he oversees the group's industry practices in Media, Financial Services and Healthcare. Before joining Morgan Stanley in 2009, Wissam was a Managing Director in the Global Leveraged Finance group at Merrill Lynch. Prior to joining Merrill Lynch’s Investment Banking Division in 1998, he worked in fixed income investment management with BlackRock for four years. Wissam received a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from McGill University and an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School.
Harlan J. Wakoff serves as a Managing Director in Morgan Stanley & Co.’s Media and Communications Group in New York. Prior to joining Morgan Stanley in 2014, he spent nine years at Deutsche Bank as a Managing Director in the Media and Telecom investment banking group, Head of Media and Telecom in EMEA and Head of Media M&A in the Americas. Before joining Deutsche Bank in 2005, Harlan spent six years at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., where he was a Managing Director heading the firm’s Media M&A franchise. From 1996 to 1999, Harlan was a Vice President of the Media and Entertainment Investment Banking Group at ING Baring Furman Selz LLC. He received a B.S. in Accounting from the State University of New York at Albany and an M.B.A. from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
MFM is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education (CPE) and CFO Summit attendees will be eligible earn up to 11.5 CPE credits. Additional information about the CFO Summit and an online registration form may be found on MFM’s Web site, at http://www.mediafinance.org
About MFM and BCCA: Media Financial Management Association (MFM) is the premiere resource for financial professionals for media industry education, networking, and information sharing throughout the U.S. and Canada. More information about MFM is available on its Web site: http://www.mediafinance.org. Its BCCA subsidiary serves as the media industry’s credit association. BCCA’s revenue management services encompass a variety of credit reports on national and local media advertisers, including Media Whys, a credit report for media businesses which offers a credit score based on industry-specific aging combined with trade data from Experian or D+B. More information about BCCA is available at http://www.bccacredit.com.
