Ex-Goldman MD who made millions in fintech takes quant head job
If you've spent nearly four years at Goldman Sachs as a managing director and have just sold your fintech for somewhere between $79m and $119m, you might presume that you'd take long years out lying on a yacht sipping exotic juices.
James Blackham is not doing this. After selling his insurtech, 'By Miles' to Direct Line for an undisclosed amount within the parameters above, he said today that he's joining retirement saving business Phoenix Group as head of quantitative engineering in 2024.
Blackham says he'll be spending his time at Phoenix, "building on their capabilities to assess, control and optimise the financial risks," and that he'll be hiring a new team in the process. That team will seemingly consist of quants with ALM skills and python developers.
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Ex-Goldman Sachs developers may want to get in touch. At Goldman, Blackham rolled out the Marquee platform which gives clients direct access to its risk and pricing systems. He left the firm in 2016, however.
Blackham has a masters in mathematical modelling and scientific computing from Oxford University. He officially left By Miles a week ago and seems to have been keeping himself busy: two weeks ago he made it into the final 128 players in the Microsoft Excel World Championships by virtue of his modelling skills.
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