The HES Team

The team at HES has broad experience in real estate and financial economics both professionally and in academia. Expertise is in the areas of new product development, research, business management, strategic planning, and marketing:

Managing Partner: John W. O'Brien. Mr. O'Brien is Adjunct Professor and Faculty Director of the Masters in Financial Engineering program at the University of California Berkeley, Haas School of Business. Mr. O'Brien created and teaches the MFE course in financial innovation. Previously, Mr. O'Brien was a Managing Director of Credit Suisse Asset Management where, among other responsibilities, he created and managed the risk management function, the client service function and the e-commerce effort. Before Credit Suisse, Mr. O'Brien was co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Leland O'Brien Rubinstein (LOR) Associates, and Chairman of the Capital Market Fund, and the S&P 500 SuperTrust - the first exchange traded fund (ETF). Earlier, Mr. O'Brien co-founded O'Brien Associates, later renamed Wilshire Associates, and co-developed the O'Brien 5000 common stock index, later renamed the Wilshire 5000 Index. Mr. O'Brien was named one of Fortune's Business Men of the year in 1987. He served as First Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force.

Patent Development and Founder: Nelson Schneider. Mr. Schneider has more than 40 years experience in the financial services industry. He spent over 15 years at EF Hutton, where he was a Senior Health Care analyst in their institutional equity research group. Mr. Schneider also worked as an investment banker in the Corporate Finance group at EF Hutton. Prior to HES, he has been the founder/CEO of several start-up businesses in the health care industry. As a co-founder of HES, he is the inventor of the patent that forms the cornerstone of the HES intellectual property portfolio. That patent, #7,516,099, entitled "Method for Managing a Home Equity Sales Program," was issued by the US Patent Office on April 7, 2009.

Capital Markets Modeling: Prof. Hayne Leland. Prof. Leland holds the Arno Rayner Chair in Finance at the Haas School of Business, U.C. Berkeley. He is a former President of the American Financial Association. He is best known for his work on financial structure, financial intermediation, and asset management. In 2008, Prof. Leland was awarded the Stephen A. Ross Prize in Financial Economics. (Given for the most significant paper in finance published in the last 15 years.) This was the inaugural award of this prize. Previously Prof. Leland received the lifetime achievement award from the Financial Intermediation Research Society, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris (Dauphine). Prof. Leland is an independent trustee of the BGI mutual funds group. He has served as a consultant to Goldman Sachs and Wells Asset Management and as a scientific advisor to numerous academic and professional groups. With John O'Brien and Mark Rubinstein, he was a co-founder of LOR, which developed portfolio insurance and introduced the first exchange-traded fund (ETF). Prof. Leland was named one of Fortune's Business Men of the year in 1987.

Real Estate Modeling: Prof. Nancy Wallace. Prof. Wallace is a Full Professor and California Chair of Real Estate and Urban Economics in the Haas School of Business, the University of California, Berkeley. She is Chair of the Real Estate Group and Co-Chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics. She teaches asset-backed securitization, real estate investment analysis, real estate strategy, and real estate finance at Haas. Her research focus includes residential house price dynamics, mortgage contract design and pricing, mortgage backed security pricing and hedging, lease contract design and pricing, and executive compensation. She has served as a visiting scholar at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, the Université de Cergy Pointoise, Centre de Recherche THEMA (Théorie Economique, Modélisation, et Applications), and the Stockholm School of Economics. Prof. Wallace is a past President of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and a member of the AREUEA board of directors. She is also a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Computational Finance.

Banking Infrastructure and Home Finance: Prof. James A. Wilcox. Prof. Wilcox is the Lowrey Professor of Financial Institutions at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Jim has published widely on banking and credit unions, on housing and mortgage markets, on monetary policy, and on interest rates. His articles have been published the top academic economics journals.

From 1999-2001, Jim was the Chief Economist at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in Washington, DC. Before that, he served in Washington as the senior economist for monetary policy and macroeconomics for the President's Council of Economic Advisers under President George H. W. Bush and as an economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Jim is a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He is a Fellow of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and the Filene Research Institute. Jim received his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University.

Asset Pricing and Real Estate Modeling: Prof. Richard Stanton. Prof. Stanton is an Associate Professor in Finance and former Chair of the Finance Group at the Haas School of Business, U.C. Berkeley. He earned a PhD in Finance from Stanford University, a BA and MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, and has been on the Berkeley faculty since 1991. He is best known for his widely cited research on mortgage markets and term structure modeling, as well as more recent work on mutual funds and valuing employee stock options. He has published numerous articles in top finance and real estate journals, and is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Finance and at the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. An accomplished teacher, Prof. Stanton has taught undergraduate, M.B.A., Ph.D. and executive students at Berkeley, and has twice won the Haas School's Cheit Award for teaching excellence. Before his graduate work, Prof. Stanton worked in consulting at Bain and Company, advising clients on acquisition valuation and the impact on their business of financial market deregulation. His recent consulting work includes developing lease valuation algorithms for a large commercial property management company, and consulting on mortgage valuation for some of the best known names on Wall Street.

Capital Markets Advisor: Scott M. Pinkus. Mr. Pinkus retired from Goldman, Sachs and Co. in 2000, after having been a partner there since 1990. At Goldman Sachs, he established and headed the Credit Derivatives Group, which was responsible for the trading, structuring, and distribution of over-the-counter credit derivative contracts, credit-linked notes, and various types of credit-intensive securitized instruments. Prior to that, he founded and headed the Fixed Income Research Department, which was involved in developing decision support tools using the latest computer technology, building quantitative models to assist in security valuation, and creating investment and trading strategies. Mr. Pinkus also focused a substantial amount of his time on risk management, electronic trading and commerce, and strategic planning for the Fixed Income Division. He originally joined Goldman Sachs in 1986 to help build the firm's Mortgage Securities business, concentrating on the research and securitization areas. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, Mr. Pinkus founded and headed the Mortgage Securities Research Department at Morgan Stanley & Co. and before that held the same position at Merrill Lynch &Co. Mr. Pinkus is currently focusing much of his attention on investing in and advising various new business ventures, as well as being involved in a number of not-for-profit activities.

Business Strategy Advisor: Vikram Nagrani. Mr. Nagrani was the Managing Partner at HES from February 2007 until March 2008. Mr. Nagrani has over 18 years of broad experience in financial services, on the buy side as well as on the sell side. Prior to HES, Mr. Nagrani was the Managing Principal and co-founder of Akul Group, a hedge fund focused on quantitative short alpha strategies. Previously, Mr. Nagrani was a Principal in the Institutional Equity Division at Morgan Stanley, and also held management roles in the Institutional Equity Division at Jardine Fleming (now part of JP Morgan Chase). In addition, Mr.Nagrani was the co-founder and CEO of an innovative wireless internet software start-up, which was sold to Interwoven (a publicly traded enterprise software firm) in July 2000.   

Marketing Advisor and Founder: Brian Costello. Mr. Costello has 25 years experience in advertising and marketing, both in print media and electronic media. He has extensive background in broadcast management as well as creative and production expertise to various marketing channels. In addition to co-founding many of the initial HES concepts with Mr. Schneider, Mr. Costello has coordinated the research effort to develop the marketing plan for launching and distributing the HES product to homeowners.

Marketing: Brent Perkins. Mr. Perkins has over 10 years experience in sales and marketing activities across a broad range of industries. Having spent the last 7 years in the banking and finance sector, he is currently a Partner at AZ Capital Solutions. He has been the co-founder/CEO of several start-up businesses in the mortgage industry; most notably with D&R Financial Group, a mortgage bank he ran with over 300 employees. His recent consulting includes loss mitigation and acquisition strategies for hedge funds and investment groups focused on distressed real estate assets.