About Financial PESTs

Financial P.E.S.T.s
(Promotion of Ethics, Simplicity and Transparency)

Mission Statement

With deep experience and expertise in capital markets, banking, investment products, insurance, and legal disputes, Financial PESTs cover the gamut of Wall Street activities.  We promote eternal core values of ethical conduct, simplicity, and truth at the intersection of the legal, financial and regulatory worlds.

Economic development, wealth creation and social progress demand efficient global capital markets and financial infrastructure.  Guiding capital effectively to existing and new businesses, inventions, and industries is a noble endeavor when properly imbued with core values.  Unfortunately, the ideal of uncompromised promotion of ethics, simplicity, and truth often fails to win its battle against perceived self-interest within financial organizations.

Knowledge and information are powerful tools that best serve the common good in distributed, rather than concentrated, form.  Through writing, lecturing, and training, Financial PESTs bring our core values to center stage to advocate the sharing of knowledge and information so that today’s markets serve all people.  We analyze financial world issues to create clarity, context, and corrective proposals.  Financial PESTs push professionals to the highest standards of probity, candor, and conduct.  We distill complex topics to their simplest forms and campaign incessantly for the simplest implementations of financial transactions, fiduciary investment programs, government laws and regulatory rules.  We seek truth in the disclosure of risks, conflicts, agendas, and loyalties.

About the Founders

Jack Chen is a Co-Founder of Financial PESTs and a finance professional who has testified in federal court on financial products and currently provides litigation support services on LIBOR and capital markets related matters. As principal of consultancy Pronetik, he is a recognized expert in structured finance where he has nearly 20 years of experience working in different roles in the capital markets.  He started as a lawyer working at Willkie Farr & Gallagher then Sullivan and Cromwell before going to the business side rating structured products at Moody’s Investors Service.  He subsequently worked in asset management firms before beginning his consulting practice. His product expertise includes credit default swaps, interest rate derivatives and total return swaps, cash, market value and synthetic collateralized debt obligations, collateralized loan obligations and structured investment vehicles.  Mr. Chen has appeared on the CBS Evening News and has been quoted or cited in a number of newspapers and trade journals, including Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, BusinessWeek.com, Market Watch News Hub, Risk, Creditflux, St. Petersburg Times, Asset-Backed Alert and Structured Credit Investor.

Joe Pimbley (Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics) is a Co-Founder of Financial PESTs and Principal of Maxwell Consulting, a firm he founded in 2010.  Joe also serves as a member of Risk Professional’s Editorial Board, a member of the Advisory Board of Solve Advisors, Inc. (financial technology and analytics), and a member of the Strategic Advisory Board of ARMA International, LLC (infrastructure engineering).  Joe is expert in complex financial instruments, financial risk management, structured products, derivatives, and quantitative algorithms.  His recent and current engagements include financial risk management advisory, credit underwriting for structured and other financial instruments, and litigation testimony and consultation.  In a prominent engagement from 2009 to 2010, Joe served as a lead investigator for the Examiner appointed by the Lehman bankruptcy court to resolve numerous issues pertaining to history’s largest bankruptcy.  Joe and his colleagues discovered Repo 105 and also reported the critical importance of pledged collateral mishaps and mischaracterizations to the Lehman failure.  Joe is a co-author of Simple Money (2013) and Advanced CMOS Process Technology (1989).  He has written more than thirty finance articles, presented more than sixty finance seminars, and holds more than ten patents for engineering inventions.

Jonathan Wetreich is a Co-Founder of Financial PESTs and has spent 20 years working in the foreign exchange markets, beginning with Honeywell International where he managed the foreign exchange execution and hedge programs.  He was responsible for managing the risk to this multinational firm from changes in foreign exchange rates, which included buy side trading in spot, forwards and options.  Jonathan followed his corporate foreign exchange experience with sell side positions at Brown Brothers Harriman, a private bank.  His positions at the bank included consulting with the senior management of corporations to improve their foreign exchange risk management and execution.  Jonathan also spent several years on the foreign exchange trading desk, working primarily with asset management firms, as well as spending time as an FX Strategist, authoring commentary on news and market activity.  Since 2012 Jonathan has run FX Hedge Consulting, an independent consultant to corporations on matters of foreign exchange risk management on litigation matters dealing with foreign exchange.  Jonathan received a B.S. from SUNY Albany in Business Administration and received an MBA from Columbia Business School in Finance and Accounting.