Built my first spreadsheet model thirty four years ago as a teenager. Hooked up with startups at 27. Now write, mentor, teach and experiment with fastest ways of losing obscene amounts of cash without gambling, banking, trading, alcohol or wheels. Bragging rights: 5 books, 4 continents, 1 cross border exit.
His Story
Jawwad Farid is a Fellow Society of Actuaries (Chicago), a MBA from Columbia Business School (New York City) and a computer science graduate. During the last 27 years, he has worked as a consultant in North America, Pakistan, Middle East, Africa and the United Kingdom with a number of blue chip clients including Aegon, Goldman Sachs, ING, Merrill Lynch, Met Life, Sumitomo Mitsui Bank, Pacific Life, Fidelity Investments, Transamerica, and GE Financial Assurance.
Jawwad’s core areas of expertise include Asset and Risk Management, Product Development and the Financial Services Back Office. He blends a rare combination of risk management, information systems, business and product development skill set side by side with his actuarial expertise. Between building back office systems, valuation platforms and hardcore pricing models for derivative products over the last two decades, Jawwad learnt how to bridge the divide that exists between business, technology, risk and compliance users. That bridge is visible across almost all of his work in consulting, writing and teaching.
He is the author of five books. On Entrepreneurship
(Reboot – 2006 – 2013), Commodity Markets (Understanding Commodities Risk – 2009) and Risk Management (Risk Application and Frameworks – 2010-2012).
His most recent titles (Models at Work, Dec 2013 and Option Greeks Primer, Apr 2015) were published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of a two textbook deal. (If you have purchased either Models at Work or Option Greeks Primer then click here to see how to get access to the EXECL sheets.)
His next title, Portfolio Optimization Models in Excel, book number six, is now in its 3rd edition and has been used to teach students in Dubai, Karachi and Singapore. All three books grew out of his teaching notes from his classes in Dubai and Singapore at SP Jain and with IBA Executive MBA program in Karachi.
Founder Puzzles, his seventh book is not a book about building better EXCEL models for businesses but instead is about building better businesses, right from the start. It shows you how to do all this faster as a founder. How to use simple frameworks in Excel to identify winning choices by asking the right questions.
His Books
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As an investment adviser, Jawwad has advised a 3 billion US$ dollar life insurance fund on allocation and bid patterns for 10, 20 and 30 year bonds, a 30 million dollar Middle East fund on ALM mismatch and fixed income strategy, a 10 million dollar pension fund on asset allocation and equity market timing in Pakistan. He has also worked with the securities regulator on assessing the state of the corporate bond market and issued valuation opinions on cross currency swaps, interest rate swaps, caps, floors, participating forwards and contingent liabilities for Exchange Guarantee Funds in the region. He has also been responsible for preparing quarterly fair value disclosures under FAS 157 for a portfolio of level 3 assets and liabilities (bonds, guarantees, credit notes and revolvers) for North American clients. In addition to his valuation expertise, Jawwad has also been part of multiple due diligence teams reviewing acquisition transactions within the financial services industry as part of the buy side advisory team.
Jawwad has worked directly as a founder, founding team member, mentor and adviser at multiple startups including two green field life insurance companies, financial services consulting operations, risk and investment advisory businesses as well as micro insurance, micro pensions and micro finance startups.
Within the startup community Jawwad’s interest lie at the intersection of online education, financial services, empowering the special needs community, impact and transformative investments and teaching computer science to middle school children. He was part of the core team that launched the PASHA Startup Insider series, PASHA Launch Pad, PASHA Social Innovation Fund as well as the PASHA Nestio incubation initiative in Pakistan.
In addition to PASHA Jawwad has also worked as a mentor for the MIT Enterprise Forum, Plan 9 (PITB), SPRING Accelerator and as a mentor and a head judge for the Asia Pacific ICT Awards since 2007. Across the last decade, he has mentored over a hundred founding teams focusing on idea validation, selling, marketing, financial planning, valuations, pitching, product development and scaling up.
Jawwad was an adjunct Faculty member at the SP Jain Campus in Dubai and Singapore from 2007 to 2018. He taught courses on Entrepreneurship, Risk Management, Derivative Products, Portfolio Optimization and Project Finance. He also teaches the Entrepreneurship elective at Habib University and the Treasury and Portfolio management course at IBA weekend MBA program.
Jawwad has run the 5 day Founder’s boot camp at Nestio for all ten batches of incubated teams from 2014-2019 as well as teach entrepreneurship and Computational finance courses at local universities in addition to volunteering as a late evening track coach.
Of all the work he has done so far in his career, Jawwad has found teaching to be the most fulfilling. It doesn’t matter if he is running a treasury products workshop for corporate bankers or a pricing option session for traders, Jawwad has consistently received above average ranking from his audiences across the world. He attributes these favourable scores to his hands-on teaching style, his real-life case studies based on market data, his ability to identify approaches that work with different student segments and his “no-concept-left-behind” instruction philosophy.
As part of the Alchemy Training practice, he has delivered over 200 courses in the last 16 years to treasury, risk, corporate and investment banking customers in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Kula Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok, Nairobi, Kampala, Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. He has been a featured speaker at Columbia Business School, University of Virginia’s Darden Business School, Habib University, SP Jain, LUMS, IBA and CBM. He has also served as a Head Judge at the Asia Pacific ICT Awards in Macau (2006), Singapore (2007), Jakarta (2008), Kula Lumpur (2010), Pattaya (2011), Brunei (2012), Hong Kong (2014), Colombo (2015), Taipei (2016), Taiwan, Dhaka (2017), Bangladesh and Guangzhou (2018), China.
He currently serves as a member of the oversight board for the PASHA Social Innovation Fund, the PASHA Google Tech Incubator TheNestIO, IBA’s Academic advisory board and the Edu Enrich Education foundation in Karachi.
Learn more about Jawwad:
Other than building models, writing books and teaching computational finance Jawwad has a habit of going off on a tangent every now and then. His other interest include creating large data sets, building counter-narratives to popular but incorrect opinions, road running and power lifting. He started road running after a break of 27 years and being told that he will never run again, runs 5k’s and 10k’s on the weekend with a group of hardcore road runners, power lifts once every week and wants to run a sub-2:30 half marathon before he turns 50. Two book projects on his bucket list are titled “How not to be stupid in the gym when you are old and dumb” and “How to get back on the road after dropping a 150 kg loaded barbell on yourself“. He feels that if you would like to know more about him, these off-topic pieces offer the best introduction. Take a look.
- Twitter Threads on startups and founders.
- Remembering John Whitney.
- The Zen of building risk models.
- Actuaries are boring, my life as an actuary.
- Math or Computer Science.
- On non traditional actuarial careers
- Rationality is over rated.
- Slower than the Flash. Slightly bigger than a duck.
- 50 seconds before 50.
- 7 years.
- Turning boys into men.
- Six years.
- Enterprise Risk – a practical perspective.
- Ralph Biggadike.
- My road to a publishing contract.
- Advance Risk Management – S P Jain Singapore Students Resource Page.
- The Old man and the hill.
- From a wheel chair to a half marathon. A guide for 48 year old dads.
- Experiential learning.
- Pakistan technology industry. Past, present and future.
- Setting risk limits that work.
