Currently, Brian is a Principal at Laurus Capitalis, LLC, which is a Private Capital Advisory and Placement Services firm that provides their services to best-in-class projects and alternative asset fund managers across: Real Assets, Real Estate and Private Equity
In his current role, he has been working on various projects for international money management firms. He continues to search for additional projects where he can help money management firms more effectively deliver their services or raise investment capital.
More details of Brian's career can be found on the "resume" page on this website, below highlights how Brian has been entrepreneurial and innovative throughout his career.
The first hallmark of my career has been that I have typically been the first person hired in the capacity for which I was recruited by my firms. This meant that my first task at every job I have ever held (most of which have been in finance in general and in money management in particular) was to assess the needs of the organization and then figure out how someone at my level could fit in and improve the performance of the group.
As an example, my first job out of college was with Touche Ross as a non-MBA analyst in the consulting division. I was the first ever person hired in this role for the Pittsburgh office in Touche Ross' new firm-wide initiative and the Pittsburgh office subsequently made me an offer when I left business school indicating that they were satisfied with my performance.
When I worked at Putnam Investments after graduating from business school, I was in the first ever MBA analyst program that continues to this day. Myself and the other analysts literally sat down and wrote our job descriptions during our first week on the job.
I was then recruited by JP Morgan who was looking for mortgage professionals (with their knowledge of options) to help JP Morgan's emerging market’s department analyze the risk of Brady bonds with all of their embedded options. In addition to being among this new group of recruits, I was the first ever “portfolio strategist” in the group and was referred to as the “portfolio manager in residence.”
Next I was recruited by ING’s alternative asset management division to create a risk management infrastructure for all of their non-traditional asset management businesses including a $2 billion hedge fund business, a real estate investment business, a private equity business and a CLO business. After accomplishing this task, they asked me to write a business plan for a hedge fund of funds business, which they then asked me to execute while still overseeing the risk management department. Part of my role as risk manager was to identify and evaluate start-up hedge fund and other asset management incubation candidates and then to help set up the asset management businesses that ING chose to seed. This entailed all aspects of operations as well as marketing
After much organizational upheaval at ING, I was recruited by some friends to start a firm that would offer fund of funds investment management as well as offer consulting services to start-up hedge funds in order to assist them with their nascent asset management businesses. We offered assistance with policies and procedures, operations and all aspects of marketing. My team ultimately agreed to team up with a mid-sized broker dealer who was looking to build an entire alternative asset management business and wanted our group to be the cornerstone of that effort. They ultimately changed their minds and one of our clients who had been trying to recruit me for years got me to agree to work as a consultant for them in order to assist them with the continued growth of their asset management business.
In my last long-term position, I was asked to build a fund of funds research and investment platform, a job I had performed at my two previous places of employment, but this time I was asked to do it for private equity funds instead of hedge funds in the “new” so called “hard asset” infrastructure sector.
Since we ended that endeavor, I was offered a consulting engagement with one of the largest investment banks in India in order to help them build an infrastructure private equity fund group. I spent a month in Mumbai where we mapped out and documented all of the policies and procedures, wrote all of the legal documents and creating solid drafts of all of their required marketing material.
In addition to this entrepreneurial streak, the second noteworthy trend in my career has been innovation.
When I first started at Putnam Investments, software didn’t exist that could tell a portfolio manager the duration of his or her portfolio. So in addition to defining our role in the organization, we had to create an entire set of software we would use to manage the risk of our portfolios. In addition, the roles of trader and analyst were not separate then, so we also had to create the entire operations infrastructure for our group including a complete trade order execution system that I created that allowed a trader to check inventory, select bonds to sell against a proposed purchase and calculate the amounts to be traded based on current market information and to finally have this information loaded back into the accounting system.
At JP Morgan my primary mission was to create new ways for investors to evaluate the risk of their portfolios as back then investors were struggling with wild swings in values of their portfolios. While there, I wrote two papers that were published in academic journals and presented to clients and at institutions worldwide. In addition, I was invited to lecture at graduate schools worldwide as well.
At ING, the role of risk management for an asset management business was quite a novel concept, so all of the tools and techniques we used we had to invent ourselves. I was also encouraged to write research while developing the risk management infrastructure and I was able to publish yet another article in another academic journal while at ING regarding risk management and continued presenting worldwide to clients, institutions, at industry conferences and graduate schools.
Once I started the fund of funds team at ING, we developed a new product for the market that brought together the asset management division, the insurance division and the investment banking division of ING. I represented the asset management division that created a principal protected note for our clients. I managed a portfolio of hedge funds, the insurance company underwrote the option that guaranteed the principal and the investment bank created the security based on the portfolio and the option As I was leaving ING, we were also working on developing a life insurance product that would allow investors to pick a portfolio of hedge funds we pre-approved and to put it into a tax advantaged life insurance wrapper. This product died without a sponsor after I left the firm.
In all of my roles as head of research for fund of funds teams, all of the processes and procedures had to be invented from scratch for the new organizations. In addition, all of these positions required conducting original research to continue to try and push the boundaries of research and understanding of how these portfolios worked and how these investment management firms ought to be investigated.
Since my days at JP Morgan, I have continued to conduct original research, to write papers and to speak to institutions and at conferences.
While at Pali, I created a detailed roadmap of how a full service financial firm could offer services to hedge funds over every step of their life cycle while also offering specific portfolios to investors who were looking to invest in funds at various points in their life cycle and with varying degrees of independence from a sponsor firm or investment manager. It is a well documented fact that startup hedge funds tend to do better than big established funds (albeit with more risk) and investors were beginning to show preferences one way or the other with their investments. In addition, there can be some conflicts as well as synergies regarding funds that are affiliated in one way or another and investors have their preferences in this area as well
Finally, Infrastructure is a relatively new asset class and while in my last position our primary role was to help investors understand how these assets could fit into their portfolios and to build some of the inaugural portfolios comprised completely of these assets.
