Bringing AI to Fixed Income

We build AI foundation models to address the $100T fixed income market, beginning with real-time, accurate pricing for munis.

Company

What we are

ficc.ai is transforming evaluated pricing in the fixed income sector. Our initial focus is real-time evaluated pricing for municipal bonds. We will expand our solutions, adding trade automation, new issue pricing and real-time on-demand yield curves. We will apply our proven technology to most other fixed-income asset classes: Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS), Specialized Pools, Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), Asset-Backed Securities (ABS), Corporates.

How we do it

The backbone of our AI uses an extensive data ecosystem. Some of the data we use includes real-time, comprehensive CUSIP-level / issuer level data, reference data, credit data, ratings, material events and much more. Our AI models also incorporate real-time trades and Muni ETF movement, as well as live ratios to other asset classes for Municipal market comparison.

Whom we help

1) Traders - automatically generating prices for inventory offerings and responding to customer bids wanted (BWs). 2) Portfolio Managers - accurately evaluate and rank order offerings in the market place and evaluate dealer bids. 3) Quants - use our pricing and model as an input or overlay to their algorithm. 4) Risk managers - use the provided associated trade data and details from our platform to support Best Execution (MSRB G-18) for compliance.

Product Highlights

ficc.ai provides highly accurate real-time evaluated prices for municipal bonds using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI). Unlike any other evaluation service, our on-demand pricing takes into account both the size and side of the trade. Our system provides accurate evaluated prices for: tax exempt and taxable municipals, all ratings categories (including high yield and non-rated), and hard-to-price illiquid bonds.

Our most popular feature is batch pricing, where the user can price 10,000+ CUSIPs at once in under a minute. Not only does this save the user time, but the accelerated pricing increases efficiency for all market participants. By having the ability to batch price thousands of CUSIPs in real-time, users of our system gain a competitive advantage. All of our product offerings are available via APIs or custom integrated solutions.

Team

Stephen Winterstein

CEO

With over 35 years of experience in municipal fixed income SMA and mutual fund management, electronic trading, and fintech, Stephen Winterstein has held numerous roles. These include serving as the Head of Municipal Fixed Income at MarketAxess and the Managing Director, Head of Municipal Fixed Income Strategy & Research at Wilmington Trust.

Gil Shulman

CTO

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.

Mitas Ray

Founding Principal Scientist

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.

Jesse Watson

Founding Principal - 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.

Myles Schoonover

Founding Principal 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 2024, and holds an M.A. from Yale University.

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.

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.

JR Rieger

A 37-year bond market veteran, JR is currently owner of the Rieger Report® LLC, and is a Lecturer at Clemson University’s Wilbur O. and Ann Powers School of Business. Previously, JR was the Managing Director and Global Head of Fixed Income Indices at S&P Dow Jones Indices where he and his team developed and launched a global suite of debt market indices resulting in investable index products in 12 countries totaling over $46 billion in assets under management. Under JR’s leadership, S&P launched the Municipal Series (maturing indices), the S&P 500 Bond Index family, the S&P Green Bond Index family and the first ever factor-based U.S. high yield corporate bond index. JR presented on the bond markets around the globe and represented S&P as a subject matter expert on the bond markets with the financial media in both print and television including CNBC and Bloomberg News. Prior to joining S&P Dow Jones Indices in 2007, JR was the Global Desk Head of Securities Evaluations at S&P Securities Evaluations (FKA J.J. Kenny).

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.