Avi Katz

Prior to founding Agam, Mr. Katz was a partner at Apollo Management where he was responsible for managing over $2 billion in alternative assets. Prior to that time, he was a partner at Och-Ziff Freidheim and, in total, has more than 24 years of experience investing in the capital markets. Mr. Katz has held many leadership positions in the financial and not-for-profit sectors. He is currently the National Chairman of NCSY and a member of the OU Executive Committee.

Mr. Katz graduated from New York University with a BS in Accounting and Economics, and he is also a Chartered Financial Analyst.

Chak Raghunathan

Mr. Raghunathan has over 27 years of experience in global financial services spanning insurance, banking, asset management, regulation and pension funds. Mr. Raghunathan is the former Global Chief Investments Risk Officer at Aflac where he was responsible for identifying and assessing investment risks in an evolving regulatory environment while developing strategies to address those risks.

Previously, Mr. Raghunathan was the Chief Risk Officer at Apollo Global Management. At Apollo, Mr. Raghunathan was responsible for implementing enterprise-wide risk management framework, formulating detailed risk policies and internal guidelines for funds, and providing optimal risk management solutions. He led Apollo’s risk management efforts in its evaluation of global insurance business opportunities, specifically in regards to Athene Holding’s life and annuities businesses right from the formation of the company.

Prior to his role at Apollo, Mr. Raghunathan held positions of increasing responsibility at TD Bank Financial Group, most recently serving as senior vice president, global head of trading risk and quantitative analytics. Mr. Raghunathan was a key member of TD’s executive team that advised the bank to strategically reposition the dealer out of structured and subprime products, thus helping the bank cement its Moody's Aaa rating during the financial crisis.

Prior to his role at TD, Mr. Raghunathan held senior management positions at the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions Canada in the Capital Markets Division and was responsible for capital markets related supervision and internal model validation for capital adequacy in banks, insurance and trust companies. Also, Mr. Raghunathan was a financial/quantitative analyst at Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec in the Tactical Investments Group, the pension fund manager for the Province of Quebec, Canada. Mr. Raghunathan started his financial career in New India Assurance Company, Madras, India as an internal audit assistant.

Mr. Raghunathan earned his bachelor’s degree in pure mathematics from the University of Madras, India and his master’s degree in applied mathematics from Concordia University, Canada.

Sheldon Epstein

Mr. Epstein has broad experience in global financial services spanning insurance, banking, derivatives and systematic hedge fund trading and risk management. Most recently he headed AIG’s Life & Retirement Modeling Team of over 50 professionals responsible for implementing a single consistent valuation platform. The purpose was to replace existing valuation systems and to be able to perform analysis using consistent models across various valuation methods for both financial reporting, risk assessment and capital analysis. A prime successful application was to meet the stringent stress testing requirements, including model governance, imposed by the Federal Reserve due to AIG’s designation as Systematically Important Financial Institution. The development has become the central platform for measuring and managing Life & Retirement product ALM risk at AIG.

​Prior to AIG, for a little over a decade, Mr. Epstein worked at a number of systematic trading hedge funds that used sophisticated algorithms to produce risk adjusted returns on various underlying securities in Fixed Income, Equity, Commodity and Foreign Exchange on a non-correlated manner to other alternative asset strategies. He was responsible for Research and Development teams of quantitative engineers and developers at these funds. In the 1990’s and late 1980’s Mr. Epstein began his career working at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Union Bank of Switzerland designing and trading customized derivative based transaction solutions to help financial institutions like banks and insurers manage their market risk exposures.

Mr. Epstein earned his Bachelor Degree in Mathematics, majoring in Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada in 1982. He qualified as a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries in 1985.

Earl Speechley

Alexander Lin

Mr. Lin is a Managing Director in Quantitative Analytics of Agam Capital Management. He is responsible for the development of the integrated asset-liability management framework “pALM”. Prior to joining Agam, Mr. Lin was the Assistant Vice President, Market Risk for Aflac Inc. in its Global Investment Office. Mr. Lin was actively involved in ALM initiatives and development of the quantitative platform for market risk, credit risk, and economic capital models. He led Aflac’s modeling effort in regulatory capital (US risk-based capital and Japan Solvency Margin Ratio), participated in modeling effort for the International Association of Insurance Supervisors. Mr. Lin was also responsible for the development of investment accounting policy involving hedge accounting, commercial mortgage loans, and alternative asset investments.

Prior to Aflac, Mr. Lin was a Manager in the structured finance group in PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP specializing in the fair valuation of structured products and fail bank acquisitions. Mr. Lin holds a Bachelor of Accounting at Florida International University, and he is also a Chartered Financial Analyst and a Certified Public Accountant. 

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Andrew Katz

Mr. Katz is the CFO of Agam Capital Management, where he oversees all finance, legal, compliance and human capital functions. Prior to joining Agam, Mr. Katz was the Head of Hedge Accounting and Administration at Aberdeen Asset Management. Previously, Mr. Katz was the Chief Financial Officer at Arden Asset Management, responsible for all finance, tax, and operations of the management company, as well as all private and registered funds. Prior to Arden, Mr. Katz served as a senior auditor at Ernst & Young and Arthur Andersen. Mr. Katz, a Certified Public Accountant, holds a B.S. in Accounting from Lehigh University.

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Naveen Bellam

Mr. Bellam has over 5 years of experience working in top-tier software development, and an additional 5 years working across management consulting and quantitative modeling. Prior to joining Agam, Mr. Bellam worked at Aflac Global Investments as quantitative analyst. In this position, he worked on various projects that ranged from portfolio reallocation, economic scenario generators to comprehensive Asset Liability management. Before working at Aflac, Mr. Bellam worked in Business consulting group of Virtusa, where he focused on Banking and Insurance. In this role, Naveen managed a team of skilled consultants and delivered innovative solutions for clients that achieved consistent market advantage by combining innovative technology, process and strategic components.

​Mr. Bellam received an engineering degree from IIT Guwahati with a concentration in Mechanical Engineering, and also holds an MBA from Indian Institute of Management at Lucknow, with an emphasis on Finance and Strategy. He further specialized in Financial Engineering with a masters in Mathematical Finance from Columbia University.

Baron Law

Dr. Law has 17 years of industrial experience. Prior to Agam, he was a manager in Deloitte Advisory engaging projects in market, credit, and operational risks with top-tier banking clients. Before that, Dr. Law was a vice president in the Quantitative and Derivative Strategies (QDS) of Morgan Stanley managing quantitative trading strategies for clients. While he was a member of Credit Suisse HOLT division, he participated in the research of equity valuation methodologies including Cash Flow Return on Investment (CFROI). Before moving to a quantitative role, Dr. Law was C++/Java developer working on a variety of trading, research and back-office systems.

Dr. Law received his PhD (Statistics) from Purdue University and his research was focused on stochastic optimal control of jump processes. Dr. Law earned his MSc (Financial Engineering) from Columbia University, MSc (Finance) from Chinese University of Hong Kong and BEng (Electronic Engineering) from University of Hong Kong. In addition, he is a CFA charterholder and certified Financial Risk Manager (FRM).

Ze Zhao

Dr. Zhao is part of the quantitative analytics team that develops the pALM system. He has many years of experience in life insurance and prior to joining Agam, he was a quantitative analyst and developer at Transamerica.

Dr. Zhao received his PhD (Applied Mathematical and Computational Sciences) and Masters (mathematics) from University of Iowa.

Alok Kumar

Mr Kumar is responsible the Agam India buildout. He had an expertise in building Indian platform in capital markets, risk & analytical space for financial services firms. He also had a broad exposure to multiple asset classes: equities, rates, forex and mortgages in his 20-year career. Most recently, he has built an Indian platform including risk, valuation, IT and middle office operations for one of the largest alternative asset managers.

At MSCI, he led the team for historical simulation for path-breaking equity factor indices. At Deutsche Bank, he was instrumental in developing long-short momentum strategy on multiple asset class. At Ocwen, he implemented QRM package for mortgage servicing rights valuation. Thereafter, he also built teams for mortgage analytics, ALM and six sigma controls. At Mecklai Financial, he did forex risk analysis for mid-tier companies in India. Mr. Kumar received an engineering degree from IIT Bombay with a concentration in Electrical Engineering.

Santosh Bag

Mr. Bag has over 14 years of cumulative experience working in risk management, financial modelling and software development. Mr. Bag worked at Apollo Advisors (for Apollo Global Management) as Senior Risk Manager. He led the risk analytics as division head and was responsible for capital market risk operations and enterprise risk reporting. He was also responsible for risk and valuation model development and was key person for in-house software development efforts. Before Apollo, Mr. Bag worked in Quantitative Finance group of Syntel, where he was part of the team responsible for CDS portfolio valuation for Credit Suisse Asset Management, London and was also engaged in fixed income research. He was also part of consulting project, where he led a team for OFAC Compliance for NCB Bahrain and Goldman Sachs. Before Syntel, Mr. Bag worked with GlobeOp Financial Services in software development. He worked in software projects dealing with secure wire payments and trade reconciliations.

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Mr. Bag received his Bachelor of Technology degree from IIT Bombay with a concentration in Computer Science and Engineering, and also holds an MBA from Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, with an emphasis on Finance.