Robert F. Cunningham 
Bob is a leasing expert, consultant and trainer on assessing risk, pricing and strategic issues in commercial finance companies. Mr. Cunningham has spent more than 20 years in leasing and corporate finance at major financial institutions, both on a principal and an advisory basis. His background includes roles in origination, structuring, and credit and risk analysis, with extensive experience pricing and negotiating complex leasing and structured finance programs. His responsibilities have also included sales, P&L and client relationship management.  Bob has been a member of the ELA’s Federal Government Relations Committee, and he is a frequent speaker and author for industry conferences and publications. Bob was Managing Director, Business Development at LeaseTrading Inc., the leading developer of the secondary market for trading and assumption of commercial equipment and consumer auto leases, responsible for program origination and relationship management.  Earlier, he was a Managing Director at Key Global Finance (now North 42 Structured Finance), where he worked on large equipment and real property transactions.  Prior to that assignment he was Managing Director, Business Head and, earlier, a calling officer and Senior Vice President, Marketing, at Citicorp Bankers Leasing Corporation, the large program unit then in the Structured Products division of Citicorp’s Global Relationship Bank. There he dramatically increased volume, led development of new products, introduced important operating efficiencies, and initiated the business’s activities in Europe.

Mr. Cunningham received a BA degree cum laude from Dartmouth College, and he earned an MBA degree from Harvard University.

 

Igor Dayen 
Igor is an applied computer scientist with advanced background in financial IT systems design and implementation, and more than 20 years expertise in software engineering, object technology and data modeling. For the past decade Mr. Dayen was involved in the design and development of different capital markets applications, including fixed-income analytic libraries, trading systems, data feed processing, enterprise-wide market risk management systems, credit risk management systems, and presently, operational risk management. Mr. Dayen consulted and worked for major financial services companies, including: Chase Manhattan Bank, Reuters America, Bankers Trust / IQ Financial Systems, UBS Investment Bank, and Fitch Risk / Algorithmics Inc. Other capital markets experience includes corporate banking applications for Citibank, where he was the lead architect of the XML infrastructure for the corporate banking division. At Citibank, Igor also developed XML-based integration solutions between the corporate banking e-payment system and the SAP banking package. His recent technical articles include "Storing XML in Relational Databases" and “VisualWorks: the Easy Way to Print” which appeared in the SIGS magazine Smalltalk Report. Mr. Dayen is also on the Board of Editors of the prestigious “IBM Systems Journal”.

Mr. Dayen earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Institute of Cybernetics of Kiev; holds an Advanced Certificate Degree in Financial Engineering from Polytechnic University of New York, and is a member of the FpML Architecture Working Group.

 

Fred Espen Benth 
Fred concentrates on modeling the valuation of financial and commodity derivatives instruments and risk management. Fred is professor of mathematical finance at the University of Oslo. He is also principal investigator at the Centre of Mathematics for Applications (CMA), established by the Norwegian Research Council. Mr. Espen has consulted extensively for KLP Insurance, one of the largest life insurance companies in Norway. His research interests and consulting efforts focus on modeling and analyzing financial derivatives instruments and portfolios, including energy and weather derivatives projects for the Norwegian oil industry. Fred has published numerous scientific articles for journals such as Applied Mathematical Finance, Bernoulli, Finance & Stochastics, Mathematical Finance, Stochastics and Stochastics Reports, and SIAM Reviews.

Fred holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Oslo and studies at the University of Mannheim.

 

Tom G. Geurts
Tom specializes is Corporate Finance and Investment Analysis through his teaching, research, and consulting.  In particular he has worked on calculating the optimal capital structure and cost of capital, as well as investment portfolio modeling.  He is currently Clinical Associate Professor at New York University.  In addition, each year he teaches a seminar for the Masters of Real Estate program at the University of Amsterdam and one for the Technical University of Berlin.  He has given guest lectures at a number of other universities, including four overseas.  He has published nineteen academic articles in peer-reviewed journals and a book on Public-Private Partnerships.  He has presented at a large number of academic conferences, both national and international and his research has been supported by a number of grants.  Finally, he is the Senior Editor of the Journal of Global Real Estate Strategies.

Tom earned a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the Higher Technical College in Zwolle.  After that he transferred to the University of Amsterdam to receive a masters degree in Economics (1991) and Political Science (1992).  To finish his education, he came to the United States to pursue his Ph.D. in Real Estate/Finance at Pennsylvania State University.  There he was awarded the Philip H. Sieg Fellowship.

 

Paul C. Kettler 
Paul specializes in computational finance, and his recent work has focused on implementing copulas in credit risk modeling. Paul is an expert in valuation and risk management applications, and he serves as an arbitrator for the National Futures Association, and as an expert consultant and witness in securities and commodities matters. Paul was president of Kettler & Company, a securities and commodity futures brokerage firm in Chicago. He also served a Director of Research of Rufenacht, Bromagen & Hertz, Inc., and as President and Chief Executive Officer of General Capital Corporation, both clearing and market-making member firm of the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Paul has published in academic, professional, and popular journals, including The Accounting Review, Mathematics of Computation, and Management Science. Paul has also served on the faculties of the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, the Keller Graduate School of Management, DePaul University in Chicago, and currently the Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo, Norway.

Paul is a summa cum laude graduate in mathematics of Princeton University.

 

Frank Leiber 
Frank is a capital markets and derivatives expert, consulting and training on market and credit risk. Frank’s experience includes training financial professionals on MKMV’s suite of credit risk management software, and leading capital markets and risk management consulting teams at Price-Waterhouse in New York. Earlier, he was with Mitsubishi Finance International, an investment bank in London, where he engineered OTC risk management solutions and structured notes, and he established the market and economics research function for JP Morgan in Zurich. Frank started his career on the financial futures exchanges in Chicago, where he developed and implemented a GARCH model to forecast volatility in the foreign exchange markets. Frank regularly gives seminars to professional audiences from financial institutions, and regulatory authorities. Frank was Professor in Financial Engineering and Program Director in the Department of Management at Polytechnic University, and he was Director of the Cornell Theory Center’s Manhattan branch, which provides large-scale and high performance computing services to the trading and risk management communities on Wall Street. He currently teaches courses on credit derivatives and CDOs at NYU. 

Frank holds a B.Sc. degree in mathematical economics and business from the University of Lausanne. He studied as a Postgraduate Fulbright Scholar at the University of Chicago, and earned his PH.D. in financial economics at the University of Geneva.

 

Sam Srinivasulu  
Sam is a specialist consultant and trainer in Asset Liability Management and Risk Management. For more than 25 years, he has presented in-house and public training programs to senior financial executives for leading financial institutions worldwide. A select list of his consulting and training projects includes:

• U.S. Federal Reserve Board - Completed a five-year assignment to provide executive development programs to senior regulators, policy makers and examiners. Two, one-week programs on all aspects of Risk Management were presented 25 times to over 500 delegates.

• U.S. Department of Treasury/Office of Thrift Supervision - For the last 15 years, he has conducted training programs on Advanced Capital Markets (Mortgage-backed Securities, Derivatives and Risk Management)
• Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions in Canada - Completed a project to design, develop and present programs on ALM for Insurance and Asset Securitization. The programs were presented several times in Toronto and Ottawa.

All these instructor-led programs served as the catalyst for establishing KESDEE Inc. and technology partner of Capital Affairs, offering a suite of e-Learning solutions on key financial topics.

Sam holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India; and a Ph.D. in International Finance from the Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Michigan, U.S.A.

 

John Struthers
John is a financial/monetary economist with 30 years experience teaching and researching at universities in the UK, Africa and Europe. He is currently a Personal Professor at the University of Paisley in Scotland, where he has also been Dean of the Faculty of Business, as well as the Head of Economics and Enterprise. His areas of interest are inter alia: exchange rates; international finance; corporate finance and financial / banking regulation. These are topics which he has taught at the graduate level, and on which he has supervised PHD students at the Universities of Glasgow, Strathclyde and Stirling, all in Scotland. John has also carried out consultancy projects for major public organizations and private companies, including training courses on foreign exchange issues for Senior Bankers in Dubai, Kuwait and other banks in the Middle East. He was for 9 years (1996-2005) a Non-Executive Director of the Paisley (now Renfrewshire Chamber of Commerce in Scotland, and he is also an active member of the prestigious Glasgow and Edinburgh Discussion Group in Finance and Investment. John has published numerous articles in leading economics and finance journals. John is a FRSA (Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts) in London, and an Academic Assessor for the UK Government’s Fast Stream Civil Service Selection Board for the GES (Government Economic Service), which recruits top economics graduates for economist positions in the UK Civil Service, including HM-Treasury, Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), among other government departments.

John holds an MA(Hons) from the University of Glasgow and MPhil (Econ), also from Glasgow.