Management

Guttman is also Investment Partner and leads the financial technology practice at Philadelphia-based TL Ventures. In addition to his investing activities on behalf of TL, he has founded, co-founded, or held other leadership roles in more than a dozen institutionally-backed ventures – serving as chief executive at several of these, including Printcafe (NASDAQ: PCAF), a 500-person software developer acquired by Electronics for Imaging (NASDAQ: EFII).

Earlier in his career, Dr. Guttman served in advisory capacities for the United States, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the OECD. He is the author of Pacific-Asian Capital Markets (OECD/Oxford & IBH), Between Bailout and Breakdown: A Modular Approach to the Latin American Debt Crisis (Center for Strategic and International Studies), US Telecommunications Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa (U.S. Agency for International Development), along with other publications and patents. Bill completed his Masters and Doctoral degrees at Balliol College, Oxford University, where he was a British Council Scholar.

Before founding Axioma, Ceria was an Associate Professor of Decision, Risk and Operations at Columbia Business School from 1993 to 1998. He was honored with the prestigious Career Award for Operations Research from the National Science Foundation, which is given annually to the two best researchers and teachers in the area. While at Columbia he was also recognized as the "best core teacher" by his students and the school. Additionally, Ceria has served as administrator for the Computational Optimization Research Center and as co-principal investigator in two National Science Foundation research projects.

Ceria is the author of many articles and has been featured regularly in a variety of publications including Management Science, Mathematical Programming, Optima and Operations Research. He has also been an editor for Optima, and a regular referee for a number of publications in the area. Past speaking engagements include international corporate and academic conferences.

Ceria completed his PhD in Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration.

Mr. Bender holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering from North Carolina State University.

Prior to joining Axioma, Olivier spent seven years as the Asia Pacific Head for risk management vendor Barra. Prior to managing quantitative solutions providers, Olivier spent nine years in investment banking as a sales trader in Europe and Asia and as a heavy user of quantitative technology.

Mr. d'Assier has been in Asia since 1996 and has lived in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.

Claude Greengard leads Axioma Client Services globally. Claude joined Axioma after a long career with IBM, where he started as a researcher in mathematics and moved on to a number of management and executive positions across IBM. These ranged from Manager, Applied Mathematics in the Research Division to his most recent IBM role as the Vice President of Technical Sales for IBM Global Technology Services. In between, he spent a number of years in the Financial Services Sector, where he created and led the Financial Services Research Center, and also served as Director of Innovation for IBM Global Services and Chief Technology Officer for IBM’s Public Sector.

Claude held a National Science Foundation Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship and conducted and published research while at the Courant Institute and the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Ecole Polytechnique. Claude has a PhD in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley and a BA in Physics and Mathematics from Wesleyan University.

Prior to joining Axioma, Ron was with Thomson Financial from 2004 until 2008. While with Thomson, he was most recently responsible for the launch of Thomson ONE Spreadsheet Link, the analytic companion to Thomson ONE Investment Management. He was also responsible for leveraging acquired QAI technology into WebQA for the next generation of Thomson Excel Add-ins, Screening, Reporting and Multi-Factor Ranking. In 2004, Ron co-led development of Thomson ONE Portfolio (desktop service for Performance Attribution and Profiling) and in 2005-2006, the launch of Thomson ONE Investment Management (the flagship product for the asset management division).

Before his tenure at Thomson, Ron was Product Manager for Baseline, contributing to a period of dramatic revenue growth. During his eight years at Baseline he expanded the product offering to include portfolio analytics, new valuation measures, peer analysis, integration of client proprietary data, and Baseline's Excel add-in. In addition, he created and helped build out the firm's consulting business unit.

Ron attended New York University where he earned his BA, MA and MBA degrees.

Stefan Schmieta is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Axioma.  He has been with the company since 2000.

Schmieta joined Axioma from the Computational Optimization Research Center at Columbia University. While at CORC, he focused on the development of a portable implementation of high-quality branch and cut strategies suitable for parallel computing. This framework is successfully deployed in research projects at several universities. Schmieta also focused on researching integer programming and symmetric cone programming algorithms.

This work has been recognized internationally and published in Mathematical Programming, Discrete Optimization and Optima.

The results of Schmieta’s extensive research are also deployed in Axioma technology. The company’s flagship portfolio optimization software, Axioma Portfolio™, is based on his powerful symmetric cone solver.  Schmieta also lead the design and implementation of Axioma's unique risk model infrastructure that allows Axioma to publish its full suite of risk models on a daily basis.

Schmieta is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and SIAM. He holds an MS degree in Economic and Industrial Engineering from Technische Universität Karlsruhe in Germany and earned his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Rutgers University.

Dr. Stubbs has extensive optimization research and experience, with a focus on developing algorithms for solving large-scale network, linear, and integer programs. Stubbs developed our robust portfolio optimization technology and has made numerous contributions to classical portfolio optimization techniques such as developing a highly effective, specialized algorithm for solving portfolio rebalancing problems with a limit on the number of assets in the portfolio. In addition to improving portfolio optimization methodologies, Stubbs continues to develop new techniques and software in other areas of financial optimization such as crossing networks, asset-liability management, and cash management.

Before joining Axioma, Stubbs was an Optimization Software Developer for LINDO Systems, Inc., where he worked on developing and maintaining the algorithmic components of LINDO products. Prior to that, Stubbs worked for First National Bank of Chicago and AT&T. At First National Bank of Chicago, he developed a simulation model for computing the expected distribution of the loss in the corporate credit portfolio. The efficiency of this model enabled simulation of the entire credit portfolio. At AT&T, he developed an automated scheduling system that dramatically reduced the number of machine changes needed to color fiber optic cable.

Dr. Stubbs earned a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management Science and a Master of Science degree in Industrial Engineering and Management Science from Northwestern University, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Mathematics from Auburn University. In his dissertation, Stubbs designed new algorithms for solving large-scale non-linear integer programming problems.

Jon has significant international experience having been based out of London as General Manager - IFR Securities Data, the leading provider of non-US new issues and M&A information, and Singapore as Managing Director for Thomson Financial's Database Group - Asia Pacific, which included the Electronic Settlements Group, now Omgeo, the industry standard for trade settlement, and Thomson Investment Software.

Jon graduated with an B.A. degree in political science from Duke University.

The most recent addition to Axioma’s Management Team, Ian Webster joined Axioma in September 2011. Ian has overall responsibility for Axioma’s business in Europe. In addition, Ian oversees Axioma’s growing global indexing initiatives.

Prior to joining Axioma, Ian was the VP of Data Strategy at Barra from 2000-2005, with Senior Management responsibility for global operations. After Barra, Ian pursued a career on the “client side”, first at BGI, as the Global Head of Market Data, where he held responsibility for data governance, global data operations, technical support, and project development, and most recently at UBS Global Asset Management, as the Global Head of Data Management and Corporate Actions, with overall responsibility for data and corporate actions across the development lifecycle, including policy development, quality assurance, standards, as well as day-to-day operations.

Prior to joining Axioma, Topher held a variety of roles at Reuters, Instinet and Liquidnet, and worked with a variety of financial information, analytics and technology startups. Topher was EVP, Head of Marketing Americas at Reuters, Head of Equities Product Marketing at Instinet and Chief Marketing Officer at Liquidnet. Topher participated as an executive in residence with the Reuters Greenhouse VC Fund with roles including board participation and as acting CEO for portfolio companies in early stages development. Topher attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Folklore and Marketing.