United Arab Emirates
Massimo is a professional with a two-decade experience in Financial Services and Technology, an academic who authored several books and papers on maths and tech for markets, and a passionate innovator on the cutting edge of transformation in markets and financial technology. He has beeen the Chief Economist of the Algorand foundation, an open blockhain platform focused on decentralization and security through cryptography and economic automation. Previously, he headed the fixed income (interest rates, credit, cross-currency and inflation) Quants in the Financial Engeneering at ISP, a top ten European bank, for more than a decade. In this role he led the design and implementation of mathematical and technological solutions for structuring, trading and risk management of financial products. He became a regular keynote speaker in the largest quant finance and risk management conferences. In the same years he advised several global financial insitutions, from the World Bank (2012-2020) to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (2017-2019). Through scientific papers and books, his research has given core contributions to the solution of several financial problems, such as the management of Credit, Funding and Capital pricing adjustments, the modelling of the Interest Rate multi term structure and basis emerged with the financial crisis, and the management of Model Risk. Since 2015, Massimo has pioneered the digitization and decentralization of Finance through blockchain technology. He was a Board Member of R3, the international consortium of largest banks for blockchain application, and one of the first contributors to the CORDA platform. He authored the first articles describing decentralized financial products and derivatives with smart contracts managing collateral and risk management (as happening in current DeFi), designing then a test implementation on Ethereum. His work on blockchain has been featured on CoinDesk, Risk Magazine, Bitcoin Magazine, Harvard Business Review and has been quoted by CFTC and US Senate. In 2019, realizing that innovation was proceeding very slowly in traditional finance, he joined Algorand blockchain founded by Turing Prize and MIT Professor Silvio Micali, helping as Chief Economist the growth of the decentralized market, the decentralization of governance, and the growth of the DeFi sector. He believes that the jouney continues, since the growth of the cryptocurrencies sector needs now to trigger innovation in regulated financial institutions. He is currently an Economic Advisor for large decentralized platforms.
Lead Scientist on Digital Tech for Economics and Finance
Helping top-10 Crypto and Blockchain with Modelling and Analytics for Tokenomics and Governance, and supporting pioneering projects.
Professor of Fixed Income and Lecturer, Term Structure and Decentralized Finance