1. Premier Profile: The Two Careers of Jennifer
Litwin
December 10, 2014 by Louis Chunovic
The head of relationship management at
consultancy Greenwich Associates has
another career as an accomplished opera
singer and musician.
Despite the big money and perks on offer, financial services professionals aren’t universally
regarded as happy campers. This is the story of an apparent exception.
Jennifer Litwin is a senior director and the head of relationship management at Greenwich
Associates, the well-known Stamford, Conn.-based provider of market intelligence and
advisory services to the financial services industry. Clients include “nearly all of the world’s
leading investment banks, commercial banks and asset managers,” the firm declares.
Take one look at the tiny blonde with the big smile and the direct look and you instantly
know she’s well suited for marketing to institutions and managing company relationships.
But the finance biz, where she’s been so successful, is not the only one for which she’s well
suited.
From Temp to AIG Associate
Flash back to nearly two decades ago, to when she was a lowly temp secretary, earning a
precarious living to support her first love, music.
She’d been studying piano and the flute since early childhood, which, these days, is how
young even the most talented musician has to start to have the proper foundation to
become a professional.
In her later elementary school days, she played piano for the school chorus, and
sometimes she would also sing a part, Litwin recalls. Then, one day, the woman who ran
the program at the elementary school “pulled me aside and said, ‘You know, your voice is
really special,’ and I’m, like, ‘Yeah whatever,’ and she said, ‘I’d like you to sing for a friend
of mine.’ And her friend happened to be George Gray, who was a tenor at the Met and
other places all around the world.”

2. Jennifer Litwin, head of relationship management, Greenwich Associates.
So the talented ’tween came in and sat down at a piano with the
Metropolitan Opera tenor. “We started to vocalize and we’d keep
going up and up and up, and I’m not really thinking anything is
spectacular, I’m just doing what I do, and he stopped and turned to
me on the piano bench and said, ‘Honey, you’ve got the money
notes.’ ” Litwin chuckles. “So I started studying with him.”
Singing was “weird at first,” she recalls. “I’d stand on stage and I
didn’t have my flute in my hands. I wasn’t at the piano behind an instrument. I was the
instrument.” Time passed. In high school, she was named Outstanding Girl Musician, and
she won awards and scholarships.
She went to college, then graduate school – all as a music student. Eventually, she
graduated Yale University’s School of Music, with a Master’s degree, and began
sporadically working at the career she’d trained for her entire life, singing as a professional,
for a time with the Sarasota Opera.
Litwin was a coloratura soprano, which meant that she specialized in music that, as
Wikipedia tells us, is “distinguished by agile runs, leaps and trills.”
She was talented, dedicated and well educated in her craft, but, as many would-be artists,
from musicians to painters to actors, will tell you (just before they tell you the special of the
day), dedication to the arts means scrambling to pay the bills.
Young Jen needed money, so she did temp office work.
“I did office jobs instead of waitress jobs, because I didn’t like the smoke, and I could type
really well, because of the piano and because my mom made me take a typing class,” she
says. One day she was brought in for a temp job at a company called AIG Financial
Products.
“I had no idea. I mean, no idea what they did. I just showed up and to me it was a typing
gig. And my role was the admin for the operations group, for back office. So I would help
type,” Litwin says. “And I wanted to know more about what it was I was typing all day. And I
even remember the day I asked a guy, ‘What’s a QUSIP? What does that mean?’ ”
Then, about three months into the gig, “I got a tap on the shoulder from Joe Cassano.”
(An AIG executive, Cassano later became controversial as a result of AIG’s near-collapse
amid the global economic meltdown of the Great Recession. There were civil and criminal
investigations into AIG’s troubles but they did not yield any charges against Cassano or

3. any other AIG official. Cassano, who left AIG in 2008, invoked his Fifth Amendment right
not to incriminate himself when he was questioned by the SEC in 2009, according to an
Aug. 11, 2014 report in The Wall Street Journal.)
“Everyone in the world may say what they say about Joe Cassano, but he singled me out.”
Litwin says today. “Everyone was looking at Joe, like, ‘What the mmpf is she doing in that
conference room with him? She’s just, you know, like a temp secretary.’”
In that conference room, Cassano said to her: “’I think musicians have a lot of skills that are
transferable.’ And then he started listing all the qualities that, I think, do ring true. You
know, discipline … you take direction well, you’re used to people barking at you on stage,
you’re comfortable on stage and in the limelight … Joe Cassano was spot on.”
Being on stage had taught her poise and presence and concentration, and to Joe she said,
“But you’re forgetting something: To me this is just a job.”
And he goes, “’Well, have you considered this,’ and, very dramatically, he slid across the
very shiny conference room table a contract. And I saw on there [a number] … And my
eyes! I was like a cartoon! And it wasn’t really that much money in reality.”
To a musician, especially one who liked her creature comforts and wanted to know where
the money to pay rent and afford health insurance was coming from, the contract Cassano
offered was very appealing indeed.
So she went in to her meeting a secretary and came out an associate in the group. “I loved
the camaraderie of the group, the energy of the group and the trading floor. To me, it was a
very natural place to be.”
Managing Two Careers at Once
Over time, the job turned into a career. “And I thought, ‘Oh well, when Pavarotti calls, I’ll
just quit.”
She stayed at AIG for more than five years, until 2001, then moved on to UBS for another
five-plus years, and then went on to Greenwich Associates, where she is today. And her
financial career blossomed.
Of course, it’s the remote possibility of lightning striking that always has fueled show-
business fantasies and artistic dreams. Remind her that it could still happen – that the
Metropolitan Opera still could call one day, out of the blue, and ask her to fill in for the
reigning diva at the last minute — and then ask her what she would do.

4. Litwin promptly replies, “At this point, I’ve found a way to manage the two [careers]
simultaneously.”
That appears to be exactly the case. Currently, she sings on stage (and in a CD) as one
half of the Litwin-Markiw Duo. For many years, she’s also taught piano, going after work to
the homes of her students, who often are the children of her financial world colleagues. “I’m
Miss Jen, and I have all these piano students. … And I teach these children to appreciate
music and have it enrich their lives,” she says, calling teaching a “huge part” of her life. Still,
she’s been brilliantly prepared for her own career in music, too.
One of her recorded songs is “Simple Gifts,” the Shaker song that Aaron Copland made
memorable in the score to Martha Graham’s great American ballet, “Appalachian Spring.”
One of its eloquent lines suggests that “to come down where we ought to be” is one of the
goals and a “gift” of life. These days, though, for many people ‘tis not so simple a gift.
In fact, for well-paid practitioners of the financial services arts, it’s regarded as nigh-on to
impossible, according to much of the conventional wisdom, which holds that the single-
minded pursuit of big bucks pushes aside any possibility of living the simple good life.
Of course, there’s the counter-example of Miss Jen, who seems to have “come down” in
the two places where she ought to be.
But what if the Met calls, and it’s either a starring role at the Met or a meeting with her firm’s
biggest client? “Absolutely it will be my firm’s biggest client. Absolutely, always, first and
foremost,” she says convincingly, then adds, slyly: “She said with a wink.”
You can find many examples of her singing online, including her soaring, operatic rendition
of Copland’s “Simple Gifts.” Just go to YouTube and search for “Litwin-Markiw Duo.”
Read more: AIG, Greenwich Associates, Jennifer Litwin, Opera