Nearly eight months after being sworn into the Oval office, US President Joe Biden has announced his pick for the next chair and president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (US Exim).

The White House said this week that it would nominate Reta Jo Lewis to lead US Exim, setting the stage for her to fill the role vacated by the departure of President Trump’s nominee Kimberly Reed earlier this year.

She’ll have to be confirmed by the senate first, however, with US Exim’s senior vice-president for small business, James Burrows, taking on the job in an acting capacity in the meantime.

Lewis has spent the past five years as a senior fellow and director of congressional affairs with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, where she’s led and overseen initiatives, programmes and exchanges between US congress members and their European counterparts.

Lewis has more than two decades of leadership experience in international affairs, legal, public policy and regulatory issues, as well as subnational diplomacy, including serving under the Obama-Biden administration.

Under then-secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, she was the first-ever special representative for global intergovernmental affairs.

Prior to joining the state department, Lewis worked as an of counsel at Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge and as a shareholder at international law firm Greenberg Traurig.

According to the White House, her legal practice “focused on providing strategic corporate, legal, and consulting counsel to the firms’ business, public finance, regulatory, and state and local clients”.

She also previously served as vice-president and counsellor to the president at the US Chamber of Commerce from 2001 to 2004.

The move follows a White House announcement in July that Biden would nominate Judith Pryor as first vice-president, an appointment which a US Exim spokesperson says is yet to be approved by the senate.

Pryor has served at the export credit agency since May 2019, when she was confirmed by the US senate alongside fellow Trump nominees Reed and Spencer Bachus.

Those appointments marked a turning point for US Exim, granting it full board quorum and bringing to a halt a four-year period of being unable to authorise financing for transactions more than US$10mn.