Alex Pilato
TradeRisks' Chief Executive, Alex Pilato, was the founder of JP Morgan's risk advisory businesses. He pioneered the development of sophisticated modelling techniques to simulate the performance of hedging strategies within the context of financial portfolios and balance sheets. He established a market reputation in risk management as a trusted advisor to central banks, sovereign debt agencies, ministries of finance, major corporates and financial institutions. He developed, maintained and supervised debt benchmarks for sovereign borrowers and debt agencies. He is a regular speaker on sovereign asset and liability management issues at World Bank and IMF conferences, and is Chairman of key industry conferences on credit and market risk, and speaker on "approaches to determine credit reserves and capital" and "asset and liability management and the role of capital" at internal seminars organised by central banks, the SEC in Hong Kong and the FSA in the UK.
After 7 years at JP Morgan, Alex Pilato moved to HSBC to lead the bank’s global risk advisory services and then to Tokai Bank Europe (TBE) as head of Capital Markets and Merchant Banking.
Alex Pilato is an experienced manager of trading teams. He managed the client trading teams at TBE over a number of years which included periods of extremely volatile market conditions such as the Asian financial crisis. He was a member of TBE's Executive, Risk and New Products Committees which were also responsible for the extensive proprietary trading activities of the bank. Alex Pilato has therefore considerable experience on the totality of issues surrounding the management of proprietary trading operations, e.g. allocation of capital across business, recruitment, traders' compensation, risk management, compliance and regulatory issues.
Theoretical Physics First Class Honours Degree, Queen Mary College, London
Mathematics D.Phil., Magdalen College, Oxford
Certificate in Investment Management, Securities Institute, London
Antoine Pesenti
Antoine Pesenti is a TradeRisks' Executive Director, responsible for Risk Management.
Antoine joined TradeRisks from the EBRD where he was responsible for the development of Monte Carlo simulation short-rate models for the risk management of government and corporate bond positions.
Prior to EBRD, Antoine was responsible for the development of yield curve and derivatives pricing models and libraries at Refco, where he subsequently became in charge of the OTC Desk risk management.
Before joining the City, Antoine Pesenti had a distinguished mathematics academic career in France and Italy. He was assistant professor of mathematics in Classe Préparatoire aux Grandes Ecoles, Lycée Monge, Chambéry.
MSc in Finance and Economics with distinction, LSE, London
MPhil in Mathematical Logic and MSc in Pure Mathematics, ENS Cachan and Université de Paris
BA in Philosophy, La Sorbonne, Paris
Certificate in Investment Management, Securities Institute, London
Andrew Hart
Andrew Hart is TradeRisks' Executive Director, responsible for Treasury Services.
After completing a law degree at the University of Liverpool, Andrew studied to become a chartered accountant, winning prizes at both the intermediate and final examinations. After six years in accountancy practice, he joined Devon and Cornwall Housing Association, where he carried out various roles before becoming group treasurer in 1998. His primary duties involved advising the board on all treasury matters including treasury policy, loan negotiation and refinancing, debt portfolio structure, cash flow and liquidity management.
Other responsibilities included investment appraisal, design and maintenance of the group's long term financial plan and strategic performance measurement across the organisation. He was also finance director of the group's commercial development subsidiary.
Law - LLB Honours Degree, University of Liverpool
Chartered Accountant (ICAEW)
Certificate in Investment Management, Securities Institute, London
Jonathan Century
Jonathan Century, TradeRisks' Non-Executive Director, has over 35 years financial and economic modelling experience in financial markets, industry and insurance.
He has been a senior member of the risk advisory team at JP Morgan and the Capital Markets Department at Tokai Bank Europe, has managed arbitrage hedge funds at Merrill Lynch and Mako Investment Managers and has developed Value-At-Risk systems at JP Morgan and Mako Global Derivatives.
Furthermore, he has developed front-office trading systems for European Central Banks, has launched the first insurance-linked security, has been head of Quant Modelling for proprietary trading teams and insurance company, has been Senior Financial Economist at British Airports Authority, and has been Senior Corporate Planner at BICC plc.
Mathematics First Class Honours Degree, Manchester University
Operational Research, M.Sc. Brunel University
M.B.A. City University Business
Fergus Murison
Fergus Murison, TradeRisks' Non-Executive Director, has over 20 years of experience in financial markets. Fergus has held the position of Managing Director at three institutions where he was instrumental in developing trading businesses and strongly increasing each group's profitability: first, at JP Morgan between 1987 - 1994, where he headed the syndicate desk; next at HSBC between 1994 - 1998, where he headed all capital markets trading, including primary and secondary activity and the derivative trading books; and thirdly at Tokyo Mitsubishi International, where he headed all sales and trading activity.
Fergus started his financial career at Orion Royal Bank in the foreign exchange markets and, after training in accounting and credit analysis, went on to become a leading figure in the development of the swap market.
In the last few years Fergus has managed a successful Macro hedge fund.
Mathematics MA, Worcester College , Oxford
Jon Slater
Jon Slater, TradeRisks' joint founder shareholder, worked within Alex Pilato's risk advisory team at JP Morgan and capital markets departments at Tokai Bank Europe in London and Tokyo. He is currently Head of Exotic Credit Derivatives Trading at JP Morgan Chase.
Jon Slater is an experienced structured derivatives trader and has a wealth of experience on risk management, benchmarking and performance measurement. He has also been responsible for the design of front- and middle-office securities and derivatives trading and risk management systems.
Mathematics First Class Honours Degree and Postgraduate year: St John's College, Cambridge
Paul Rickard
Paul Rickard is the Structured Finance Director and joined TradeRisks in 2006.
Upon completion of his studies at the London School of Economics, Paul joined the Corporate Tax Real Estate team at Arthur Andersen before joining Deloitte where he obtained his ACA qualification. Paul spent 6 years working in the Real Estate and Banking & Capital Markets teams, including a 20 month secondment to the Financial Services team in New Zealand.
Paul’s duties within Arthur Andersen and Deloitte were a variety of domestic and cross-border compliance, consulting, structuring and project management roles in a number of jurisdictions.
Paul focuses on fund management, domestic and cross-border structuring, taxation issues, business planning, project management, and new business generation.
BSc in Philosophy & Economics, LSE
ACA Chartered Accountant, ICAEW
Certificate in Investment Management, Securities Institute, London
Nathan Pickles
Nathan Pickles joined TradeRisks in 2008 as Associate Director focussing on Risk Management.
Nathan moved to TradeRisks from KPMG Corporate Finance where he worked as an advisor and financial modeller, with a particular focus on structuring project finance transactions.
Prior to his time at KPMG Nathan also worked as a Senior ALM Analyst at HBOS, and as a Treasury Accountant and Risk Analyst at the Skipton financial services group, where he played a central role in designing hedge accounting systems and derivative pricing models introduced under IFRS fair value accounting.
Nathan was an international prizewinner whilst studying towards his ACMA accounting qualification.
Mathematics and Cellular Biology First Class Honours Degree: University of Durham
Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) Passed Finalist
Certificate in Corporate Finance, Securities Institute, London
Certificate in Investment Management, Securities Institute, London
Simon Century
Simon Century, Senior Analyst, joined TradeRisks in 2006 following completion of his undergraduate degree reading Psychology at the University of Liverpool.
His award-winning research used a priming based approach to investigate the link between spatial-temporal intelligence and musical stimuli.
Simon leads the business plan integration function of TradeRisks as well as being heavily involved in all treasury operations, project management and business generation.
BSc in Psychology Honours Degree, University of Liverpool
Certificate in Investment Management, Securities Institute, London
Sven Gerlach
Sven joined TradeRisks as an Associate in 2008.
After completing his Degree in Economics at the University of Manchester in 2007 Sven joined Merrill Lynch as an Analyst in Investment Banking. His main focus was on Real Estate M&A transactions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. During that time Sven provided crucial real estate related M&A advice on some of the largest European property transactions in 2008.
After one year at Merrill Lynch, Sven joined TradeRisks where he is responsible for fund management.
BSc in Economics, University of Manchester
Certificate in Securities and Financial Derivatives, Securities Institute, London
Sam Watson
Sam Watson, TradeRisks' Office Manager, joined the company in 2008 following completion of her undergraduate degree in Mathematics at the University of Exeter.
BSc in Mathematics Honours Degree, University of Exeter
Greg Brandt
Greg Brandt, TradeRisks' Quantitative Developer, joined the company in 2005 after completing his masters in IT & Economics at The Poznan University of Economics.
Greg has over three years combined experience working as an application developer, IT consultant and business analyst at Bertelsmann AG and also at the Nieruchomosci Wielkopolski, property company. Greg’s past experience includes 1 year Java and webservices development, 2 years Delphi and 3 years database (Oracle, PostrgeSQL, MS SQL Server, PLSQL) design and development.
MSc in IT & Economics, University of Economics, Poznan
Certificate in Investment Management, Securities Institute, London
Xiaoda Lin
Xiaoda joined TradeRisks as Quantitative Developer in 2008.
Xiaoda holds a Computer Science degree from Imperial College and has two years experience in object oriented programming and database development, in particular server side core Java development, multi-threaded system module design, Java performance tuning, and database design and optimisation.
BSc in Computer Science, Imperial College London
Ian Wanags
Ian Wanags, TradeRisks IT Administrator, joined the company in 2008. Ian has previously worked at The JM Group coordinating the business relocation and developed the automating and streamlining of processes. With over 4 years IT consultancy experience Ian has focused on network analysis and business continuity.
Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator, Thomson Prometric