Vested LLC: A NYC PR Firm
Vested LLC is a leading NYC PR firm. Led by Dan Simon, its co-founder and CEO, and Binna Kim, its co-founder, and president, Vested focuses on serving the financial industry in New York, as well as others, through locations in San Francisco, London, and Toronto. Simon got the idea to start the firm in 2015, after a successful career as president of Cognito, an international financial communications firm, and senior financial communications consultant to many firms that retained Expertise after he and Kim started the company.
His non-fiction book, “The Money Hackers: How a Group of Misfits Took on Wall Street and Changed Finance Forever,” recently received an award from the Nonfiction Authors Association & Writers Conference. He’s also been an instructor for mediabistro.com since 2007 and has been a contributor to Forbes Magazine since 2012.
Active in the community, Simon serves in a leadership role in charge of PR and marketing for Spare, a New York nonprofit whose goal is to help families in need, particularly during the pandemic, by encouraging consumers to round up their grocery and food delivery bills in support of food banks in their area. He has also chaired the Museum of American Finance’s Communications Advisory Board since 2014.
Like Simon, Kim also has a deep background in finance but also a more diverse one. Her experience goes back to being layout/design editor for Brookline Bulletin to managing editor at the Wellesley News, and producer/writer intern at WCVB -Channel 5 in Boston. From there, Kim was a freelance designer for Shine Design and then editor for Keem, Inc.
Kim’s professional journey then took her to Merrill Lynch, where she served as senior marketing analyst for two years, during which she managed marketing campaigns and oversaw the production of various supplemental pieces. She left to join Cognito as its managing director in 2006, where she met Simon. There, she successfully led various integrated campaigns across various channels, for both small and large financial brands.
Clients
Some of the agency’s high-profile clients include American Express, Morgan Stanley, Morningstar, Diebold Nixdorf, Wirecard, Neptune Financial, RBC (Royal Bank of Canada), and Bloomberg.
One of Vested’s lesser-known clients is JC Flowers, a private, global investment company. Because of the pandemic, it, like many other financial firms, couldn’t hold its usual in-person global investor conference to highlight its portfolio and introduce its investment team. For this industry, security is paramount, and Vested quickly responded and put together a strategy for a secure webcast.
Not only did Flowers experience attendance four times greater than before, but Vested produced a video with custom animation that clearly showed its audience the locations of where the funds were being invested, and also provided valuable counsel to the firm on how to best adapt its investment messages relating to the pandemic and economy to its investor audience.
