Team
Shams Karim, Founder and CEO
In 1999, Shams founded Advanced Financial Applications (AFA) and its broker/dealer subsidiary EGS. Over the next 7 years, while serving as Head of Product Development and as a member of the Management Committee, AFA developed and deployed five separate versions of their core order management system which was successfully rolled out to 100+ buy-side customers. During this time, AFA also raised over $15 million from outside investors.
Prior to AFA, Shams held senior equity derivative sales roles at Morgan Stanley (New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong) and for ten years focused on structured products and basket trading.
Shams has an MBA in quantitative finance & economics from the Stern School of Business, New York University.
Shams' primary responsibility is product development and management.
email: shams.karim@nirvanasolutions.com
Tejpal Chadha , CTO and Partner
Tejpal was the co-founder and CTO of Vhayu. He was responsible for developing the company's core technology and assembling a team of advisors and management.
Mr. Chadha developed the core concepts of how real-time, streaming time-series data is captured, stored and analyzed, which led to the creation of Vhayu Technologies Corp. Prior to launching Vhayu, Mr. Chadha was co-founder and chief technology officer of Gizmo Technology Corporation, a company involved in the investigation, development and analysis of key microprocessor technology and systems required for 21st century set-top box, PC, embedded and client/server products.
At Intel, Mr. Chadha was head of architecture and validation of the iTantium project with close to 100 direct reports and was involved in both business and technical issues relating to the launch and development of the new 64-bit architecture. Prior to this, Mr. Chadha was one of the principal architects of the Pentium chip.
Mr. Chadha received a Bachelor of Technology degree in electronics engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Benaras, India and holds a Masters of Science degree in computer engineering from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Tejpal is responsible for product architecture, development processes, and managing the development team.
email: tejpal.chadha@nirvanasolutions.com
Steve Lewczyk, Senior Managing Partner
Steve has played many roles in his 20 years in the technology and financial services industry. Steve has built, managed and led enterprise software sales organizations for financial technology leaders.
Steve was a key employee at Advent Software where he built the sales organization that expanded Advent's client base from 500 to 3000 investment firms.
He left Advent and spearheaded Fidelity Investments' entry into the registered investment advisor market as Divisional Vice President of its Institutional Brokerage Group. Steve was responsible for business development, general management and sales management for over 20 states.
He returned to Advent to head a new business unit called Advent Custodial Data. Steve had general management responsibility which resulted launching a new data management service that grew relationships with over 300 global custodians and prime brokers, over 2,000 investment firms and several alliance partners. Once that business entered its growth phase, he became Vice President of Corporate Development. He made strategic investment, acquisition and partnership arrangements with emerging software companies that extended Advent's leadership position.
Steve is responsible for sales, marketing and corporate development activities.
email: steve.lewczyk@nirvanasolutions.com
Peter Curley, Managing Partner
Prior to joining Nirvana Financial, Peter was the product manager for Advent Software's order managment system (OMS), Moxy. He oversaw all the product marketing activities for Moxy which is used worldwide by nearly 800 firms. He had a special emphasis on trading and hedge funds and has authored a number of articles and whitepapers on these subjects.
After business school Peter joined IBM's Strategy and Change group as a strategy consultant. He was attached to IBM's Financial Services practise.
Peter began his career as a registered representive at Charles Schwab and was a team lead for the introduction of Schwab's innovative e.Schwab electronic brokerage offering. He later was involved in the development of Schwab's active trader application, Velocity.
Peter holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from University College Dublin, a Master's from University of Exeter and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
Peter is responsible for the product marketing and management of the Prãna trading suite.
email: peter.curley@nirvanasolutions.com
Mohsen Moayer, Vice President
Mohsen serves as Nirvana’s Vice President of Product Management and Client Relations. He directs the functionality of the Prana portfolio management system and the implementation cycle of Prana for Nirvana’s clients.
Mohsen has held various leadership, client-facing and technical roles in his 8 years in the financial services industry. Prior to joining Nirvana, Mohsen worked at Advent Software, where he managed a team of technical business analysts responsible for an STP workflow which included the development of custodial data interfaces used by over 2,600 of Advent’s customers, as well as trading integration with Advent’s brokerage partners, via FIX and flat file networks. Also at Advent, Mohsen managed a team of client-facing engineers, responsible for building custom reports, utilities and data file integration for Advent’s portfolio management systems, APX, Axys and Geneva, as well as its OMS product, Moxy. He served as product manager of Advent’s Hedge Fund Reporting Package, derived new performance formulas widely used by Advent’s hedge fund and asset management users, and consulted extensively with clients on customization and optimization.
Mohsen’s current fields of interest include the design of portfolio and fund management systems, P&L and performance computation, as well as fixed income and quantitative analysis. Mohsen holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering, with emphasis in Applied Physics, from the University of California at Berkeley.
email: mohsen.moayer@nirvanasolutions.com