Our History

Company and product

Global Valuation is a software company that was established in 2007, with an original mathematical framework for pricing and risk analytics. Over time, software product has evolved into a fully programmable model development and execution framework, called Esther. This framework provides customers the freedom to design and implement models themselves while technical complexities are abstracted into the enabling software that is the same for all customers and use cases.

The original software design had a monolithic software architecture without a modelling language and no universal solver. Business logic and execution logic were mixed together, as they are in the prevalent pricing and risk architectures still today. Regardless, version 1 was market-leading in its capabilities for XVA-style models.

In the past five years, a new modern, layered architecture enabled by a modelling language, along with a cloud-friendly software architecture, were implemented. The latest evolution into a container-based architecture has industrialized the platform, ready for large-scale deployments with enterprise security.

Our Team

The Global Valuation Board has decades of experience in mathematics, pricing, risk management and large-scale technology delivery across Financial Services. We are serial entrepreneurs with leadership experience from large Banks, FinTech and business services.

Claudio Albanese

Founder

Claudio was tenured Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto and Chaired Professor of Mathematical Finance at Imperial College London. In 2006, Claudio founded Global Valuation with the purpose of developing a new generation risk analytics platform.

Claudio’s research work in Finance includes over 25 publications in prestigious peer reviewed journals on topics related to counterparty credit risk, capital and funding reserve management, stress testing, model risk, collateral, pricing theory and numerical analysis for risk and pricing.

Claudio has a PhD in Theoretical Physics from ETH Zurich and held post-doctoral positions at ETH Zurich, Princeton University, New York University, UCLA and Caltech.

Petri Arola
CIO/CTO, Equity Partner

Petri was a co-founder of Delta Capita Group in 2011, where he was Group CTO and CIO of the CLM business line. Responsible for the technology strategy across the group and the delivery of CLM and data platforms for managed services and consulting engagements.

Petri spent his earlier career in business and technology advisory & solutions delivery, working for Accenture and Detica Capital Markets. He has acted as a senior technology advisor for numerous financial institutions including HSBC, Société Générale, ING, Standard Chartered and Lloyd's of London. His focus has been in front office trading and data solutions and risk management.

Petri has a M.Sc(Econ) from the Aalto School of Business in Helsinki.

Martin Lamb
NED, Equity Partner

Martin has been a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and UBS for the last 15 years in various Global CIO roles, leading large teams across the world.
He has led technology across the Finance, Risk, Treasury and Treasury Trading domains and has a deep functional and technical understanding of how Financial Services operate. In parallel to his CIO roles, Martin has operated as the overall technology lead for Data at two tier 1 banks and was also the CTO for back and middle office. In his early career Martin was a consultant for 6 years, leading the transformation at LCH and BACS Voca.
Martin has a degree in Civil Engineering from Imperial College (London) and was a structural engineer for the first 10 years of his career, designing oil and gas platforms in Europe and Africa.

Philip Freeborn
NED, Equity Partner

Philip is currently the group COO and CIO at Delta Capita Group. Prior to joining Delta Capita, Philip was the Global Head of Banking at TORI Global.

Former Group Chief Information Officer at Barclays Investment Bank responsible for Technology and Operations.

Previous roles at Barclays include Wealth COO and Head of Integration and Africa COO.
Earlier Philip was the CIO of UBS Investment Bank and UBS Paine Webber

Gary Wong
Equity Partner, Advisor

Gary is an experienced FinTech partner covering AI/ML, Big Data and cutting-edge Technologies, at Production levels. Currently advisor and business developer for multiple AI/ML and FinTech firms, hedge funds and banks. Gary has previously worked as Head Quant Trader and Head of Structured Trading in Mitsubishi Securities. He grew profits by 500% and built up the Trading, Quant, FO Risk and FO Technology groups.
With deep business knowledge and wide range of clients’ coverage and problems solving, Gary is an expert on business-technology interfaces, leveraging cutting-edge technology to create practical business applications that ‘move the needle’ on P&L, workflow/control and big data.
Gary has a PhD in Physics from Imperial College.