LEADERSHIP TEAM
Deep and broad expertise across the
capital markets industry.
Risk Focus leaders come from diverse professional backgrounds, bringing a wide range of skills and expertise with them. Through seamless collaboration, we deliver outcomes that advance your business objectives in powerful ways.
Vassil Avramov
Founder and CEO
Vassil steers the business and technology direction for Risk Focus. Under his supervision, Risk Focus teams have built trade, risk management, and connectivity platforms for some of the largest banks, hedge funds, and clearinghouses. He co-founded Risk Focus in 2004.
- Started his career in Silicon Valley with one of the pioneers of handwriting recognition, then moved into FinTech as a developer before moving into client management with a risk software vendor
- Founder and board member of RegTek Solutions, a regulatory software solution acquired by Bloomberg in 2019
Vadim Gelman
Head of Delivery
Vadim serves as a solution architect and overall delivery lead. He is best at implementing cutting-edge distributed systems and interfacing with the quant and machine learning teams. He co-founded Risk Focus in 2004.
- Began his career as a software developer and continues to consult as a software engineer
- Brings decades of risk management and high-performance computing experience
Srikant Ganesan
Head of Financial Services
Srikant guides the delivery of global technology programs. He draws on his extensive capital markets knowledge to provide thought leadership to buy- and sell-side clients on their strategic technology initiatives.
- Shaped the UBS trading risk platform across credit and rates desks, delivering the ability to support end-of-day and near-real-time risk computation, aggregation and visualization
- 18 years of experience in hardware and software in telecoms, networking, and capital markets
Lloyd Altman
Head of Business Development
Lloyd helps clients realize the best delivery approaches to advance their business objectives. He brings more than 25 years of sales and leadership experience in capital markets.
- Held prior practice leadership positions at Accenture and Random Walk Computing as well as technology leadership positions at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers
- Professional cellist in New York for 8 years before changing careers
Joel Scotkin
Head of Strategy
Joel helps drive the direction of Risk Focus and its customer offerings. During his career, he has been instrumental in hundreds of business-critical projects with clients from nearly every major capital markets company.
- Founder and CEO of Random Walk Computing—one of the leading firms for custom software development and technology strategy services to the capital markets industry
- Former CEO and current board member of Masten Space Systems, which won the X-prize for vertical takeoff and landing under his leadership
Peter Meulbroek
Head of DevOps & Cloud
Peter sets the cloud computing strategy for Risk Focus. With a strong enterprise delivery background, he brings more than 25 years as a technologist and technology leader. He focuses the practice on client transformation, DevOps adoption, and AWS/cloud to accelerate delivery and decrease risk.
- First introduced to the cloud in 2005, building automated provisioning for Yahoo and founded the DevOps practice at Risk Focus
- Has had a career spanning academia, startups, high-tech, and finance
Tara Ronel
Head of Pittsburgh Delivery Center
Tara helps drive Risk Focus expansion across new regions, verticals, and customers. A delivery-oriented software leader, she has focused on supporting business strategies at start-ups and large enterprises for 20 years.
- Served as CTO, then CEO of SnapRetail, leading a full company restructure, launching a new product line and expanding the business into a new vertical
- Hired as Google’s first product manager in Pittsburgh, driving development and adoption of new internal technologies to reduce application latency and improve the productivity of engineering teams across the company
Steve Nieker
Chief Operating Officer
Steve ensures operational processes run efficiently while also promoting a human-first culture that brings out the best in Risk Focus talent. He is a veteran tech entrepreneur with almost 30 years of experience growing consulting and product companies.
- Co-founder and CIO of Sphere, which established the contextual advertising space prior to its acquisition by AOL
- Started his first business at age 21 and went on to found a series of tech businesses across product, media, service, and consulting
Cary Dym
Head of Business Development, DevOps
Cary is responsible for seeing that the needs of clients guide Risk Focus day to day. He leads sales and go-to-market strategy as well as manages client and strategic partner relations, including AWS.
- Former VP of sales at Cloudify and Global Cloud Solutions and business development leader at Alcatel-Lucent
- Started his career with AT&T Bell Labs