Company
What we are
ficc.ai is a financial technology firm based in Seattle and New York that provides accurate real-time pricing for over one million municipal bonds, enabled by the latest advances in machine learning. Our artificial intelligence models provide continuous understanding of the market for munis, enabling all market participants to operate with greater speed, visibility, confidence, and efficiency.
How we do it
Our technology creates profit opportunities by enabling users to evaluate buying and selling opportunities systematically and quickly. This allows clients to take advantage of market inefficiencies and achieve alpha in a repeatable way. Increasingly, the determination of market actions, both on the sell side and buy side, is done by algorithms. Our technology is a crucial enabler of this trend for municipal bonds.
Whom we help
Accurate real-time price evaluations are valuable not just for traders, but also for asset managers, broker/dealers, portfolio managers, municipal advisors, underwriters, issuers, alternative trading platforms, compliance managers, financial advisors, end investors, and more.
Product Highlights
AI-powered real-time pricing streams for municipal bonds give investors and traders an unparalleled advantage in the market. Our product includes the first-ever fully data-driven, fully objective, fully real-time yield curve for the muni market, and advanced algorithms that continuously improve the accuracy of our pricing capabilities. Our product can incorporate decision theory for optimized automated trading and additional machine learning for optimized hedging, ensuring that we remain at the forefront of the industry.
By using deep neural networks, which outperform decision tree methods and other older methods, we deliver accurate results throughout the trading day, far more useful than the end-of-day prices provided by existing services. Estimated prices and predicted yield-to-worst (YTW) can be consumed via API, via in-house applications, and/or via spreadsheets. All software is cloud-based and highly scalable, so integration with existing order management systems and trade processing systems is straightforward.
Team
Gil Shulman
Founder & CEO
Prior to starting ficc.ai, Gil spent six years at Microsoft AI and in the Amazon core machine learning team, where he drove initiatives to apply state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques to real-world applications with several hundred million users. Earlier, Gil founded Amobee, the world’s first mobile advertising company, sold to Sing-Tel for $324mm. He started his career as a software engineer and has an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Charles Elkan
Founder
Charles was most recently a managing director at Goldman Sachs in New York, where he was the global head of machine learning. Previously he led the central machine learning organization for Amazon in Seattle, and spent many years as a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of California, San Diego. He has a Ph.D. from Cornell University in computer science and an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Cambridge University.
Ahmad Shayaan
ML Software Engineer
Ahmad Shayaan joined ficc.ai from Columbia University, where he earned his M.S. in financial engineering. He has previous research experience in artificial intelligence and at hedge funds. He also holds M.S. and B.S. degrees in computer science from IIIT Bangalore (India).
Jay Alpert
Executive Director of Business Development
Jay Alpert’s career spans over 40 years on Wall Street. He managed trading and underwriting for Paine Webber, before becoming an owner and partner of Taylor Byrne, Inc. He then led the Municipal Bond Department of M.R. Beal (as executive Vice-President). At Sterne, Agree & Leach—whose New York office he launched—Jay was branch manager of trading and sales, where he also established a public finance platform. A past board member of FINRA’s Financial Technology and Compliance Committee, Jay is a graduate of Brooklyn College (CUNY) and the New York Institute of Finance; he is a veteran of the US Marine Corps.
Jesse Watson
Data & Research
Jesse came to ficc.ai from Oberlin College (Ohio) where he was a professor teaching courses on technology in East Asia. He has also taught at Smith College (Massachusetts) and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.A. from Peking University (China) and a B.A. from Wesleyan University (Connecticut). Jesse has been a Fulbright Scholar of the US Department of State.
Mitas Ray
Senior ML Software Engineer
Prior to joining ficc.ai, Mitas was a researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, working on machine learning methods for sequential decision making and decision-dependent optimization. Mitas holds a M.S. from the University of Washington. Immediately after earning his B.S. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, Mitas was appointed as a lecturer there.
Myles Schoonover
Product Manager
Prior to joining ficc.ai, Myles was a professor at Lee University. Previously Myles had been a researcher at the Université de Lorraine (Metz, France) as well as at Oxford University (Oriel College). Myles will defend his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Groningen (Netherlands) in 2023, and holds an M.A. from Yale University.
Isaac Lim
ML Software Engineer
Isaac has extensive experience in both machine learning and finance. He earned his M.S. in management science and engineering from Columbia University in 2021. Previously, he earned a B.S. in economics with first class honors at University College, London. Isaac has worked on applied machine learning projects for the Ministry of Finance in Singapore and the luxury group LVMH.
Senior Advisors
Joe Geraci
Joe is a founder of Intricate Bay Capital. From 2018 until recently he was co-head of the Global Spread Products division at Citi. Earlier, also at Citi, he managed sales, trading, structuring, and lending businesses for municipal securities. Joe graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and he has served on the Municipal Securities Rule-making Board (MSRB), of which he was Vice Chair.
Ross Jackman
Ross co-founded Old Orchard Capital Management, an investment advisor that specializes in trading municipal bonds, in 2014. Earlier he was a partner at First New York Capital Management, a managing director at Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), and a vice president at J.P. Morgan and Prudential Financial.
Contact us
click here to request a demonstration of our technology. You can also email our Municipal Markets Product Manager Myles at myles@ficc.ai or our CEO Gil at gil@ficc.ai
We are always looking for world-class software engineering, financial, and machine learning talent to join our growing team. If you are interested, email us at jobs@ficc.ai