The amazing story of how a Navy pilot-turned-Superbowl winner made it on Wall Street

Phil McConkey is not your average Wall Streeter.

His father worked three jobs to put him through private school. He served in the US Navy as a nuclear weapons transshipment pilot, before winning a National Football League Superbowl title with the New York Giants.

He is now president at Academy Securities, a broker-dealer founded in 2009 that employs veterans and service-disabled veterans in areas like investment banking and trading.

McConkey sat down with Skiddy von Stade, CEO of finance career services company OneWire, to talk about his background, and Academy Securities. 

During that conversation, he laid out why experience with the military is valuable for those who want to break into the cutthroat financial services industry.

Military culture is honesty, integrity, loyalty, teamwork and by the way, service. We're in a service industry. Who knows more about those qualities than military veterans? When those qualities and experiences come into helping our clients, it really resonates.

He added:

We're a small company, growing. We'd like to be a bulge-bracket investment bank broker-dealer at some point. We don't have the resources that the big banks have, but we're nimble, we're quick, and we have differentiated types of value that we add. We got nine senior-level retired generals and admirals, people who have fingers on the pulse of geopolitical macro world we live in. And that's a value to customers if they're in capital markets. If they're managing money. 

Watch the full interview below and check out OneWire's Open Door series for more interviews with finance and other industry leaders: