Aaron Packles is the Head of the Financial Institutions Investment Banking Group Americas and also serves as Senior Strategic Advisor to Jefferies Financial Group. He has been an investment banker for 20 years and has worked on over $350 billion worth of transactions. He spent the first decade of his career as an M&A investment banker at Merrill Lynch & Co. where he was promoted to Managing Director and served as the Chief Operating Officer of the Global M&A Business. Aaron spent several years post the U.S Financial Crisis advising the United States Treasury on its selling its multi-billion dollars of positions owned in many dozens of the banks across the country. Aside from this, his transaction work includes working with numerous institutions, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking, Cathay Pacific, Banc of California, Carlyle Group, Sutherland, Cerberus, Freedom Mortgage, Texas Capital, CommonBond, and others. Aaron graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and received his MBA from there as well.