PhillyInc: Philly Fed undergoing some changes

With the turn of the calendar to 2012, several changes are being made to the nine-member board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Two senior managers of fast-growing organizations will take the place of two retired executives.

Michael J. Angelakis, vice chairman and chief financial officer of Comcast Corp., and Patrick T. Harker, president of the University of Delaware, will join the board in January.

With a private-equity background, Angelakis joined Comcast as its CFO in 2007. He was the executive who negotiated the Philadelphia company's acquisition of NBC Universal in 2009.

Harker has run the University of Delaware, which has an enrollment of more than 21,000 undergraduate and graduate students, since July 2007. During his tenure, the university bought the closed Chrysler factory in Newark, Del., and unveiled plans to turn the 270-acre site into a science and technology campus.

Angelakis and Harker will replace Charles P. Pizzi, the former president and CEO of Tasty Baking Co., and Michael F. Camardo, the retired president of Lockheed Martin Information & Technology Services in Cherry Hill.

Currently headed by Charles I. Plosser, the Philly Fed is one of the 12 regional reserve banks that make up the Federal Reserve System. Its board is not the one whose every word can affect markets; that's the 12-member Federal Open Market Committee that meets eight times a year to set monetary policy.

Rather, members of the local Philly Fed board act as the eyes and ears of business conditions in a district that encompasses about three-quarters of Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and all of Delaware.

Pizzi had been chairman of Philly Fed's board for the last two years. In early December, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors selected Jeremy Nowak, president and CEO of the William Penn Foundation, to serve as chairman of the Philly Fed. Nowak had been deputy chairman since January 2010.

James E. Nevels, chairman of the investment advisory firm Swarthmore Group and a Philly Fed board member since January 2010, was appointed deputy chairman, replacing Nowak.

Directors serve three-year terms. Six board members are elected by member banks. Three are bankers, while the other three cannot be directors or officers of a bank or bank holding company. The last three, who must also be non-bankers, are appointed by the Fed's Board of Governors in Washington.

Angelakis was appointed by the Fed Board of Governors. Member banks from the Philadelphia region elected Harker to his first term and reelected Frederick C. "Ted" Peters II, chairman and CEO of Bryn Mawr Trust Co., to a second term.