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Featured Interview
Scott Mitchell, new Chief Executive Officer at InspereX
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Scott Mitchell
Scott Mitchell, a prominent executive in the financial services industry, was appointed InspereX’s Chief Executive Officer in January 2025.
Mr. Mitchell joined InspereX after a 20-year career at J.P. Morgan, where he held leadership positions across Equity Derivatives and Cross-Asset Structured Investments Sales and Marketing. He joined J.P. Morgan in 2004 to co-head U.S. Third-Party Structured Investments Sales, launching the firm’s third-party distribution business, as well as its brokered CD platform. Mr. Mitchell was later promoted in 2006 to serve as sole head of the business.
In 2011, Mr. Mitchell was appointed Managing Director and Head of J.P. Morgan Americas Structured Investments Distributor Marketing (SIDM). He was later promoted to Head of Americas Equity Derivatives Sales and SIDM in 2014 and then Co-Head of Global Equity Derivatives Sales and SIDM in 2019. He led the build-out of J.P. Morgan’s SI 360 technology platform and also led the firm’s investment in the SIMON advisor technology platform. Mr. Mitchell served on the boards of SIMON and later iCapital after SIMON was sold to iCapital in 2022.
Before joining J.P. Morgan, Mr. Mitchell served as Director, Equity-Linked Structured Products Sales for CIBC Capital Markets. A native of Toronto, he earned a degree in business administration from Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario.
Mike Nicholas, Chief Executive Officer, Bond Dealers of America:
Mike Nicholas, Chief Executive Officer, Bond Dealers of America:
Scott - Thank you for joining us today. Before we get into your vision for InspereX, I’m wondering if you can tell us about the firm. InspereX in 2025 - versus Incapital at its founding 25 years ago.
Scott Mitchell, Chief Executive Officer, InspereX:
Scott Mitchell, Chief Executive Officer, InspereX:
Mike - Thanks for featuring InspereX. Incapital was founded in 1999 with a vision for expanding individual investor access to what, at the time, was the heavily institutionalized world of corporate bonds.
Today, InspereX has largely the same mission – but with a wider suite of products. We continue to offer our InterNotes retail notes program and a full suite of fixed income products, including CDs, Corporates, Agencies, Munis, and more, but also structured notes and, more recently, ETFs with KraneShares. We have plans to add additional solutions later this year.
We also interact directly with financial advisors much more today than we did 25 years ago through our wholesaling relationships and through our fixed income technology platform, BondNav. While BondNav makes it easy for advisors to search, curate, and analyze bonds, it is always backed by the expertise and full service of our trading desk and salespeople.
Mike Nicholas:
Mike Nicholas:
Scott – You joined InspereX after a 20-year career at J.P. Morgan, where you held senior positions across Equity Derivatives and Cross-Asset Structured Investments Sales and Marketing. During your tenure, J.P. Morgan grew to be the No. 1-ranked client franchise in equity derivatives and was named Equity Derivatives House of the Year in November 2023 by Risk Magazine, among other recognitions.
Please talk a little about your industry experiences and what led you to InspereX.
Scott Mitchell:
Scott Mitchell:
Before leading the Equity Derivatives Sales team at J.P. Morgan, my first job at JPM was actually in retail structured products, and Incapital was one of my first clients. So in a lot of ways, I feel like I’m coming full circle. I launched J.P. Morgan’s 3rd party distribution business in the U.S. and launched its brokered CD platform as well. From a technology perspective, I led the build-out of J.P. Morgan’s SI 360 technology platform as well as its investment in the SIMON structured products platform and then served on the boards of SIMON and iCapital.
My experience building the issuance and technology platforms at JPMorgan makes the role of InspereX CEO a uniquely good fit. On top of that, I’ve known our founder and chairman Tom Ricketts for more than 20 years now, and I have always admired the Company’s team and culture.
Mike Nicholas:
Mike Nicholas:
InspereX’s legacy firm Incapital was founded 25 years ago by Tom Ricketts and, from the outset, pioneered delivering innovative, institutional-quality strategies and offerings to the retail market. Now, InspereX is an industry leader in underwriting, marketing, and distributing a wide range of fixed income investments and structured products.
As you look at InspereX, the company and the individual business lines, what’s your first order of business here, as the new CEO?
Scott Mitchell:
Scott Mitchell:
My first order of business has been meeting with InspereX’s long-standing customers and getting to know them at a deeper level. Many have been with InspereX since its early days.
With the needs of those customers in mind, we plan to invest in technology and client service, as well as expand the mix of differentiated investment solutions we provide. Of equal importance, there is a tremendous opportunity for us to add value to the rapidly growing RIA client base as well. We are off to a good start with the integration of BondNav into many RIA practices, but there is a lot more we can do.
Mike Nicholas:
Mike Nicholas:
InspereX’s Advisor Pulse Survey conducted immediately after the Presidential election found that advisors were bullish on the S&P for 2025 but expecting one or more market corrections. How do you think this outlook has changed since the survey, and how does it impact InspereX’s business across asset classes?
Scott Mitchell:
Scott Mitchell:
Well, it seems our clients got it largely correct. Our November 2024 Advisor Pulse Survey found that market volatility was the second-most common worry advisors were hearing, right behind inflation. Now, we have entered a cycle of high market volatility, and with that comes higher investor anxiety.
At the time of our survey, advisors rated client anxiety as only moderate – an average of 5.1 on a scale of 1 to 10. Since the survey time in November, we are hearing from advisors that client anxiety has increased.
The great news is that this is an ideal time for InspereX’s solutions that give investors the peace of mind to stay invested. We’re offering defined outcomes and downside protection in the form of FDIC-insured CDs and principal-protected notes, as well as buffered exposure through ETFs and market-linked notes.
Mike Nicholas:
Mike Nicholas:
What challenges are individual investors most concerned with in today’s markets? What about institutional investors? What is InspereX doing to solve those challenges?
Scott Mitchell:
Scott Mitchell:
As I mentioned, individual investors are worried about inflation and about market volatility. They want to know if their children will be able to attend the college of their choice. They want to know if they’ll be able to retire while they are young enough to enjoy it. They want to go to sleep at night not worrying about their investments.
For those investors, InspereX is providing education about and access to solutions to help manage risk and decrease worry.
The biggest concern for institutional investors right now is uncertainty over both fiscal policy (tariffs, US debt & the deficit) and monetary policy – that uncertainty in the short to medium term makes it hard to forecast rates and make directional bets.
Mike Nicholas:
Mike Nicholas:
Can you talk about how InspereX thinks about the spectrum of risk-managed investments and specifically where you think your fixed income business is headed in terms of growth, diversity of product, and expansion of dealer partnerships?
Scott Mitchell:
Scott Mitchell:
One of InspereX’s inherent strengths is our diversified portfolio of offerings. Our investment solutions aren’t necessarily correlated with each other. If some asset classes are struggling, others are likely finding success. This diversification strategy has served us well in the past, and I think will continue to do so.
Our Fixed Income Group operates at the intersection of issuers and investors, constantly balancing the needs and priorities of both. This unique position drives us to expand in three key areas: distribution, issuers, and technology. Growing our distribution network means deepening relationships with existing clients while expanding access to new broker-dealers, RIAs, and traditional institutional clients. On the issuer side, we’re focused on broadening our platform to provide more capital-raising solutions. At the same time, we’re investing in technology to enhance efficiency, improve market transparency, and ensure seamless execution for both investors and issuers.
Mike Nicholas:
Mike Nicholas:
Sticking with fixed income, can you talk a little about InspereX’s fixed income tech platform BondNav? Meaning development and growth, expectations for 2025, etc?
Could you talk about how BondNav helps advisors manage risk?
Scott Mitchell:
Scott Mitchell:
Similar to the way InspereX got its start by connecting the retail investment market to institutional-quality offerings, BondNav connects retail wealth managers to institutional liquidity. Connecting these market participants creates great opportunities to deliver value to clients.
At its heart, BondNav is helping advisors find the bonds they want, when they want them, so that they can grow their practice and accelerate their success. The RIA market and especially advisors breaking away from larger wirehouses are in need of support from Fixed Income professionals. At InspereX, we use technology to provide visibility and access to the broader universe of fixed income investment options, and we marry that to our long history of white glove-level service and expertise.
Our hybrid approach is what many RIAs need and want so they can grow assets and scale effectively. In this way, we are helping advisors manage risk – the risks of investing and also the risks of not providing the level of service and expertise that individual investors expect when they want to trade individual fixed income securities. We have a number of exciting new platform integrations underway that should dramatically expand the user base over the coming months.
Mike Nicholas:
Mike Nicholas:
What are the major growth opportunities for InspereX? Where is the most demand from your partners and clients?
Scott Mitchell:
Scott Mitchell:
Our key growth opportunities lie in product expansion, helping more clients achieve success, and making it all fast and easy with technology. In terms of products, when you think of InspereX, we want you to think about us as the home of diversification and differentiated products – our product mix offers advisors and institutions a variety of ways to customize portfolios to suit their objectives. It’s at the core of our new relationship with Kraneshares; we are bringing their highly targeted ETFs to our network of advisors. This is just the first in a series of new products we expect to be offering in the coming months – from traditional fixed income to more sophisticated structures and alternative asset classes.
At the same time, we’re focused on expanding our partnerships across wealth channels. The best way to do that is to focus on education – we have one of the strongest distribution organizations in the market. Our team spends much of their time teaching advisors about how our solutions can help them differentiate their business by adding significant, customized benefits to their client portfolios. Whether they’re new to structured products or to trading individual bonds, we’re here to help advisors grow their business by giving their clients a superior investment experience.
When it comes to technology, we have a strong fixed income foundation in BondNav that makes it much easier and more efficient to source and select individual bonds across the marketplace. Our technology objective is to grow and evolve our platform to reflect our expanding product offering, while making sure the platform easily fits into our clients’ existing tech stack and workflow – this way, we can be our clients’ go-to tech resource for their diversification needs.
Mike Nicholas:
Mike Nicholas:
In terms of Federal regulation, there is a lot of focus at the SEC and throughout Washington on protecting the retail client.
What are the most pressing regulatory issues impacting InspereX?
Scott Mitchell:
Scott Mitchell:
With new leadership at the SEC, we know that many regulations are being reevaluated, and we are hopeful that due consideration will be given to cost-benefit analysis and the regulatory burdens on smaller broker dealers. For example, Rule 15c2-11 (prohibition from publishing quotes for OTC securities unless current issuer information is publicly available) continues to pose a potential impediment for certain issuers, particularly non-profit issuers, if dealers cannot facilitate a liquid secondary market for the fixed income securities of those issuers
We are fully supportive of efforts by the SEC and/or FINRA to revisit the overriding premise of one-minute trade reporting, address the important questions raised by market participants, and re-evaluate from a cost-benefit analysis. In other words, will the substantial costs and operational changes necessary to implement these amendments to the TRACE reporting rules result in a tangible benefit for the investing public?
On a positive note, we do foresee a reallocation of enforcement resources, particularly at the SEC, towards the fundamental protection of retail investors, as well as a focus on individual violators as opposed to bringing enforcement actions that broadly penalize shareholders and stakeholders at corporate and other entities. We also foresee a return to a normalized rule-making process (providing appropriate time for public comment on proposed rules and conducting more in-depth economic reviews to understand the financial impact of new regulatory rules), with additional regulatory guidance to assist firms in implementing new rules and a movement away from “rulemaking by enforcement.”
Mike Nicholas:
Mike Nicholas:
In closing, I’d like to revisit the first question and talk a little more about the business here at InspereX and your vision as CEO over the next five years.
Scott Mitchell:
Scott Mitchell:
Over the next five years, our goal is to become the leading distributor of fixed income and structured solutions to the broker dealer and RIA communities, while simultaneously adding scale to our institutional fixed income business. We will accomplish that by investing aggressively in people and technology, by partnering with our issuer clients to deliver differentiated investment solutions, and by providing best-in-class technology platforms and education.