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.

Dr. Sebastián Ceria is Chief Executive Officer of Axioma. Before founding Axioma, Ceria was an Associate Professor of Decision, Risk and Operations at Columbia Business School from 1993 to 1998.

Ceria has worked extensively in the area of optimization and its application to portfolio management. He is the author of many articles in publications including Management Science, Mathematical Programming, Optima and Operations Research. Most recently, Ceria's work has focused on the area of robust optimization in portfolio management. He has co-authored numerous papers on the topic, including, "Incorporating Estimation Errors into Portfolio Selection: Robust Portfolio Construction," published in The Journal of Asset Management, “To Optimize or Not to Optimize: Is That the Question?” published in the Oxford Handbook of Quantitative Management, and “Factor Alignment Problems and Quantitative Portfolio Management”, published in the Journal of Portfolio Management. He is a recipient of the Career Award for Operations Research from the National Science Foundation.

Ceria completed his PhD in Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, and his undergraduate degree in Applied Math at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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

Chris Canova is responsible for product business plans and strategy at Axioma, where he oversees the efforts of the product management teams.

Chris has over 12 years of experience consulting, training, and relationship management in the portfolio analytics space. His expertise spans the use of portfolio construction tools, risk analytics for superior risk control, and leveraging performance attribution analysis to identify ways to systematically improve portfolio management processes with clients. He has helped numerous clients, including leading asset managers, consultants, hedge funds and plan sponsors, to successfully implement new ideas. Prior to joining Axioma, Chris held a number of positions in the client support and sales organizations of Barra, subsequently MSCI Barra, from 2000 through 2006.

Chris joined Axioma in July 2006 as Director of Sales and Account Management, US West, before being promoted to his current position in early 2012. In his previous sales leadership role, Chris successfully established Axioma’s west coast client facing team, leading efforts resulting in significant business expansion for Axioma in the western US, while managing four of Axioma’s strategic global accounts.

Chris earned a B.A. in finance from California Polytechnic State University, with a minor in economics, and was awarded the CFA charter in 2003. He is a member of the Chicago Quantitative Alliance.

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.

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.