(Bloomberg) -- John “Jack” Malvey, a respected figure in the bond market whose decades in the industry included a long run as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s chief strategist in fixed income, has died. He was 72.

He died on April 11 after an extended illness, according to a death notice on the website of the Hugh M. Moriarty Funeral Home in Montclair, New Jersey.

Malvey was the chief global fixed-income strategist at Lehman Brothers and managed the team that ran the firm’s bond indexes, which became benchmarks that guided bond investors of all types. Those gauges became the Barclays Capital Bond Indices and, ultimately, the Bloomberg indexes.

He was at Lehman from 1992 to 2008, when, facing bankruptcy due to the global financial crisis, the firm sold its investment banking business to Barclays Plc. He stayed at Barclays for just a few months.

Mark Howard, a managing director at BNP Paribas who worked with Malvey at both Lehman and Barclays, said he watched Malvey bring the Lehman indexes from a “backwater thing in the IT department” to guideposts for the wider industry.

“I owe a lot of my good fortune in the business to a trail that Jack blazed,” Howard said in an interview. “He had a particular vision – not about next week’s trade but about the development of markets, the business of portfolio management and the business of fixed income. He used that vision to innovate.”

Among those innovations, Howard said, was a weekly broadcast on bonds that made Lehman one of the first sell-side Wall Street firms to record videos sharing their viewpoints, something that became commonplace. 

Malvey’s strategy team at Lehman was ranked first in Institutional Investor magazine’s annual poll of the best US bond analysts for 16 consecutive years, according to a 2011 Bank of New York Mellon announcement on his appointment as chief global market strategist there. He most recently worked as a special counselor at the Center for Financial Stability.

‘Intellectual Curiosity’

Malvey “was one of the true architects, innovators and contributors to the fixed income and broader financial industry,” Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of global fixed income for BlackRock Inc., said an an email on Wednesday. 

“Few people have had such an impact on this industry; he created a spirit of intellectual curiosity and was a model for the pursuit of excellence that is reflective of how we all work today,” Rieder said. 

In a post on LinkedIn, Lale Akoner, portfolio manager at Newton Investment Management, paid tribute to Malvey as “a legend,” a “mentor” and “my first boss who took me under his wing, hired me right after my grad degrees, instilled in me a passion for markets and investing.” 

Malvey was born on Dec. 27, 1951. After graduating from Georgetown University in 1973, he spent two years in the Air Force, then studied at the New School for Social Research in New York.

He began his career at Moody’s, then worked at Kidder Peabody before landing at Lehman. 

He held the Chartered Financial Analyst designation and belonged to the New York Society of Security Analysts and the Fixed Income Analysts Society, according to the Center for Financial Stability.

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