Todd Sears

Out Leadership’s founder, Todd Sears, has a long history of innovation, integrating business opportunity with next-generation leadership and diversity. A former investment banker at Schroders and DeSilva & Phillips, as well as a first-quintile financial advisor at Merrill Lynch, he brings an in-depth understanding of the challenges facing senior leadership in corporations today, as well as how to leverage diversity initiatives to increase and retain talent and market share.

After creating the first national team of financial advisors on Wall Street to focus on the LGBT community, which brought more than $1.5 billion of new assets to Merrill Lynch, Todd moved into diversity leadership. He has pioneered diversity initiatives at Merrill Lynch as Head of Strategic Initiatives for the Office of Diversity, as well as at Credit Suisse, where he served as Americas Head of Diversity and Inclusion. Both organizations continue to be ranked among the top companies in the Fortune 500 by diversity organizations like Working Mother, Black MBA, the Human Rights Campaign, and others.

A key innovation of Out Leadership is its engagement and summit model, including its founding initiative, Out on the Street, the first senior-level leadership summit “for Wall Street, by Wall Street. Considered the “Davos of LGBT Wall Street,” Out on the Street engages more than 2,900 of the international financial industry’s most senior executives and 60+ CEOs to leverage the collective power of Wall Street for the LGBT community. Out on the Street is now global with twenty-four member firms and scores of leading nonprofit and research partners. Out Leadership’s initiatives also include the newly launched Out in Law and Out in Insurance, as well as the LGBT emerging leaders initiative called OutNEXT.

Todd, a graduate of Duke University and Woodberry Forrest School, is also an active philanthropist and community leader. He is the founding co-chair of Jeffrey Fashion Cares, a fashion show fundraiser supporting LGBT civil rights, youth and HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, which has applied an innovative cost-structure to raise millions of dollars since its inception. Todd is a senior advisor to the Task Force for Talent Innovation as well as Christopher Street Financial. He also serves on the non-profit boards of The Williams Institute of UCLA, The Palette Fund, and Lambda Legal.