Distinguished Young Alumnus: Matt Schreiber
History, teaching graduate finds his footing in family's investment firm
Posted on: October 26, 2018; Updated on: October 26, 2018
By Page Ivey, pivey@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-777-3085
Matt Schreiber didn’t come to Carolina expecting to become a private wealth manager. In fact, his degrees, a bachelor’s in history (’03) and a master’s in teaching (’04) are more often associated with less financially lucrative careers.
But after teaching in Sumter, South Carolina, the New Jersey native returned home to work with his father in the family business, WBI, a provider of institutional and private wealth management.
“My dad called and said he needed a good sales guy,” Schreiber recalls. “And he said, ‘If you can’t hack it, I’m going to have to fire you.’ ”
Clearly, the younger Schreiber was able to “hack it,” raising more than $500 million in assets for WBI and becoming the largest single sales producer in firm history.
Today, in addition to his role as president of the company, overseeing WBI’s day-to-day operations, he also is the firm’s chief investment strategist responsible for market and economic analysis, portfolio strategy and product design and development.
“One good thing about my history background was I could do research really well,” Schreiber says. “I also knew a lot about what had happened throughout recorded history broadly enough to understand different periods and their economic drivers.”
When Schreiber arrived at Carolina, he started as a music major and spent a season in the marching band. Then he went to a smaller college for one semester to play soccer, but came back to Carolina and was a walk-on with the track team, running the 3,000-meter steeplechase event.
“I am competitive,” he says. “On the track team, I was competing every day just to stay on the team with world-class, Olympic-caliber athletes.”
He says his whole experience at Carolina, in the classroom as well as on the track, helped him be successful while still fairly early in his career. He has endowed a scholarship at Carolina to support track athletes.
“I am very grateful to have the experiences that I had there,” says Schreiber, winner of the university’s 2018 Outstanding Young Alumnus Award, which honors a graduate younger than 40 who has achieved extraordinary success and significantly set themselves apart from their peers.
Schreiber says he still uses many of the skills he learned at Carolina in his daily work.
“Investors left to their own devices frequently make the wrong decisions for the right reasons,” Schreiber says. “So I’m still teaching, whether it’s teaching our clients about investing or teaching our employees about where we’re going and how we’re going to get there.
“I’m applying everything I learned at Carolina.”
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