Executive Management

The Globecon Group has a new management team with proven hands-on expertise in financial and educational services as well as information technology. This team, with the support and commitment of Globecon's longstanding core staff of professional development experts, is dedicated to strengthening our leadership position in the industry. We are excited by the opportunities provided by these changes and committed to enhancing our position as the premier professional development provider to financial services executives.

Our Management Team Includes:

Paul Siegel
Chairman and CEO
Paul Siegel is an accomplished banker with over 20 years in various investment banking, venture capital, financial advisory and operating roles, including the last 12 years focused in both the information and technology sectors. His areas of interest and expertise principally concern growth and expansion stage companies involved in technology-based products or services, enterprise software, business process outsourcing, new media or IT services, and publishing or content-oriented businesses. He has extensive experience in publishing, financial services, travel and health care businesses, as well as in business-to-business and business-to-consumer firms in the technology arena. Mr. Siegel began his career in the real estate investment banking arena. He held positions of increasing responsibility at Olympia & York, Cushman & Wakefield and, ultimately, Daiwa Securities America Inc., where he was responsible for managing that company’s real estate investment banking department. Mr. Siegel holds an MBA from the New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business, where he participated in the International Management Program and received a certificate from the ESADE in Barcelona, Spain. He also holds a BA degree with honors from the University of Pennsylvania, where he participated in Benjamin Franklin Scholar program. Mr. Siegel wrote large sections of Foreign Investment in U.S. Real Estate, which was published in hard cover by the Nihon Keizei Shimbun in Japan in 1990. He is a member of the board of the American Friends of the Jerusalem College of Technology, as past members of the boards of the MIT Enterprise Forum and The International Policy Roundtable (chairman). He may be reached by email at paul.siegel@globecon.com.
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Piers Vaughan
Managing Director, Operations and Technology
Piers Allfrey Vaughan has over 25 years of experience focused exclusively in the banking and financial services sector. With 10 years at HSBC (including Midland Montagu and Midland Bank) and 6 years at Deutsche Bank, Piers’ experience has focused exclusively in the middle and bank office operations and process management arenas. The scope of his expertise ranges across Globecon’s principal practice areas, including Capital Markets, Credit & Banking, Risk Management, Infrastructure (including Custody), Treasury/Cash Management and Wealth Management. Mr. Vaughan has developed and delivered numerous operations and process management training programs for global financial institutions, from UK, to Germany, to Switzerland and to the Americas, including for recent graduates as well as senior executives. Prior to joining Globecon, Piers was Vice President of Operations at Deutsche Bank as well as Head of Operations Product Development for the Deutsche Bank Private Bank. At Deutsche Bank, he became responsible for global compliance with new Bundesbank trading and sales rules, and ran the pan-American review of compliance with international guidelines for trading and sales. He was involved in FX, options and STP business re-engineering, as well as ISO9000 accreditation.

Piers’ roles at HSBC, Midland Montagu and Midland Bank included Senior Manager Systems Information Technology; Joint Head of Strategic Management Information; and, Manager, Strategic Planning & MIS, Group Treasury. Mr. Vaughan managed a two year project to create an integrated central risk database to monitor credit, market and country risk, as part of a global STP initiative to reduce errors and costs; he managed a project to reconcile the general ledger databases of three merging companies to ensure consistent and accurate reporting under the supervision of the external auditors; managed various projects to automate the time-consuming and expensive credit approval processes in the retail and wholesale banks; and, was involved in extensive project management training for front- and back-office senior managers and project managers.

Piers earned his MBA from Cranfield School of Management and his MA from Oxford University (Exeter College). He achieved his Professional Project Management Qualification (M.A.P.M.) from the Member of the Association of Project Managers in 1993. He may be reached by email at piers.vaughan@globecon.com.
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Ehsan Nikbakht, PhD, CFA, FRM, PRM
Managing Director, Director of Academics and Instruction
Ehsan Nikbakht is a Senior Instructor at Globecon with over 15 years of experience in derivatives, quantitative finance, and capital markets products and applications. Ehsan is very actively involved in Globecon’s capital markets and risk management professional development programs, training needs analysis and advanced curriculum design initiatives and CFA test preparation courses. He combines solid intellectual rigor and practical experience to a wealth of Globecon initiatives.

Prior to his work at Globecon, Ehsan was the chairperson of the finance department and the associate dean of the Frank Zarb School of Business of Hofstra University on Long Island, New York, where he specialized in teaching derivatives, quantitative finance, and capital markets. He was also a regional director of the CFA Weekly Review Program of Schweser (a Washington Post company) in New York in charge of developing curriculum, recruiting instructors, and teaching advanced courses. Ehsan has trained over 1000 CFA and FRM candidates globally.

In 2004, Ehsan was voted as the Executive MBA Teacher of the Year at Hofstra, and received the Dean’s Award for “outstanding teaching and service.” He has published books and journal articles, and presented research papers at national and international finance conventions. His research book on foreign loans received a Stessin Prize for an "Outstanding Scholarly Publication."

Ehsan has served on the Advisory Board of the Association of International Financial Engineers. He was the Director of Financial Derivatives Symposium, the Editor of Hofstra Business Review, and he currently serves on the editorial board of Global Finance Journal. He has written extensively and been a facilitator at hundreds of educational conferences and workshops worldwide.

Ehsan received his doctoral degree in finance from George Washington University in Washington D.C. He is a CFA charter holder, a certified Financial Risk Manager (FRM) and a certified Professional Risk Manager (PRM). He may be reached by email at ehsan.nikbakht@globecon.com.
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Johnathan Mun, PhD, FRM
Chief Learning Officer
Johnathan Mun has been involved in the financial service businesses for over 10 years. His specialization is in real options, financial valuation, financial analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, stochastic forecasting, optimization, project management and risk analysis. He also has extensive experience in econometric modeling, economic analysis, and statistics. He has been actively involved in Globecon professional development programs in these topics and is responsible for many of the analytical models and toolkits available from Globecon.

Prior to joining Globecon, Dr. Mun was the Vice President of Analytics at Decisioneering, Inc. where he headed up the development of options and financial analytics software products, analytical consulting, training, and technical support. There he created of the Real Options Analysis Toolkit software. Prior to joining Decisioneering, Dr. Mun was a Consulting Manager and Financial Economist in the Valuation Services and Global Financial Services practice of KPMG Consulting and a Manager with the Economic Consulting Services practice at KPMG LLP. His experience prior included being Department Head of financial planning and analysis at Viking Inc., the FedEx subsidiary performing financial forecasting, economic analysis, and market research.

Dr. Mun has authored eight books including Modeling Risk: Applying Monte Carlo Simulation, Real Options, Optimization, and Forecasting, (Wiley 2006), Real Options Analysis: Tools and Techniques, First and Second Editions (Wiley 2003 and 2005), Real Options Analysis Course: Business Cases (Wiley 2003), Applied Risk Analysis: Moving Beyond Uncertainty (Wiley 2003) and Valuing Employee Stock Options (Wiley 2004), among others. He has also written numerous academic articles published in the Journal of the Advances in Quantitative Accounting and Finance, the Global Finance Journal, the International Financial Review, the Journal of Financial Analysis, the Journal of Applied Financial Economics, the Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, the Financial Engineering News, and the Journal of the Society of Petroleum Engineers.

Dr. Mun is the creator of the Real Options Super Lattice Solver software, Risk Simulator software, and Employee Stock Options Valuation software, as well as risk analysis training videos. These applications are available from Globecon as add-ins to Excel, and can also be run in a myriad of other environments. Dr. Mun is also a finance and economics professor and has taught courses in financial management, investments, real options, economics, and statistics at the undergraduate and the graduate M.B.A. levels. His appointments include as full professor at U.S. Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, California) and the University of Applied Sciences (Switzerland and Germany), as well as at Golden Gate University (California) and St. Mary’s College (California). He serves as Chairman of the International Institute of Professional Education and Research (IIPER), an accredited global organization providing the Certified in Risk Management (CRM) designation. He also holds the position of the EU President of the American Academy of Financial Management and sits on the Global Board of Standards at the AAFM.

Dr. Mun received his Ph.D. in Finance and Economics from Lehigh University, where his research and academic interests were in the areas of Investment Finance, Econometric Modeling, Financial Options, Corporate Finance, and Microeconomic Theory. He also holds an M.B.A. in business administration, an M.S. in management science, and a B.S. in Biology and Physics. He is Certified in Financial Risk Management (FRM), Certified in Financial Consulting (CFC), and is Certified in Risk Analysis (CRA). He is a member of the American Mensa, Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society, and Golden Key Honor Society as well as several other professional organizations, including the Eastern and Southern Finance Associations, American Economic Association, and Global Association of Risk Professionals. He may be reached by email at johnathan.mun@globecon.com.
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