Martha Martinez Karasch

Martha Martinez Karasch is a registered municipal advisor with Choice Advisors dedicated to serving charter schools across the country. She specializes in helping charters with all aspects related to capital planning from plan inception to securing optimal and tailored financing solutions to achieve defined financial goals. As a fiduciary to charter schools she is involved at all stages of the charter life cycle as an advocate and partner to her clients. Prior to her career as a financial advisor, Martha spent 12 years as an investment banker providing tax-exempt bond underwriting solutions to a variety of public sector issuers across the country. During her career as an investment banker she served on over $8.2 billion in par amount, $1 billion of which was for charter schools. Most recently, Martha was a Senior Vice President at BB&T Capital Markets where she focused solely on charter schools and helped the firm’s charter practice become the leading national underwriter in the sector. Prior to joining BB&T, she worked at Oppenheimer & Co. as a Director in the K-12 public finance group. There she was responsible for providing quantitative analysis and technical support to the firm’s Southwestern clients including charter schools, public independent school districts, cities, and community colleges. Prior to joining Oppenheimer, she served as an Assistant Vice President in Piper Jaffray’s Public Finance group. While at Piper, she served on various financings for Texas issuers including charter schools, school districts, community colleges, counties and cities. She helped start the Texas public school practice for Piper Jaffray. Before Piper, she was based out of UBS Securities’ Chicago office where she provided analytical, quantitative and day-to-day investment banking support for Midwest issuers. While at UBS, she served state agencies, local governments, state revolving funds, toll and highway authorities, school districts, universities and community colleges. Martha graduated magna cum laude from Loyola University Chicago with a B.B.A. in Economics and Finance.

She is a Series 50 registered municipal advisor representative. Previously, while as an investment banker she held the Series 7 FINRA designation.