Robert Rendine, who eight years ago left the chairmanship of the Rhode Island Republican Party to become chief spokesperson at GTECH, is headed to Wall Street, where he will become a senior vice president and chief spokesperson for the American Stock Exchange. Rendine’s challenge will be to help the beleaguered exchange regain the stature it once had.
”Amex at one point in time was one of the preeminent exchanges, but fell on some tough years,” Rendine said. “Amex was probably the victim of poor management.”
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But the American Exchange and NASDAQ (the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations)were bought by NASD (the National Association of Securities Dealers), something that Rendine says is helping the American Exchange regain its status.
”Amex and NASDAQ are brother and sister exchanges,” Rendine said.
Rendine said AMEX plans to “spin off and become publicly owned,” establishing itself on a number of fronts. Currently, he said, it is the leading exchange in the area of options, the “clear leader” on index funds, “and the equity business is getting better.”
”Amex is creating a niche market for smaller companies that need added value services,” Rendine said, “focusing and targeting small to mid-cap companies of a billion dollars and below that get might lost in the shuffle at NASD and NASDAQ.”
By value added services, he said, the exchange means items such as investor relations support, a “wider range of services along those lines.”
For Rendine the move to Wall Street is another step in a public communications career that has gone from politics to corporate and now to the American Exchange. From 1986 to 1991 he was chief of staff to then Congresswoman Claudine C. Schneider and then from 1991 to 1992 was chairman of the Rhode Island Republican Party. He left to head communications for GTECH in February 1992.
GTECH, which lists on the New York Stock Exchange, has revenues slightly above a billion dollars, with a communications department that stretches from corporate headquarters in West Greenwich to Texas and London.
”I came out of politics and media relations and cut my teeth in the corporate world here,” Rendine said. Now he will coordinate all communications for the American Exchange in what he calls “a very complex environment.”
