James Velissaris is a top derivatives trader and philanthropist. He was born to an African-American mother and a Greek father, James grew up in Chicago. With exquisite qualities of his humility, confidence and faith, he lays down the credits of all his behavioral traits and success to his mother. James always excelled at school from an early age but before working in finance, James Velissaris was an athlete who was known for his football skills. He was a local football star and played football at Glenbrook North Illinois high school where he set a single-game rushing record in 2001.

Velissaris ended up at Harvard University, where he played first as a running back and second as a cornerback. He graduated from the university with a degree in economics. He also received a master’s degree in operations research, with a concentration in financial engineering, from Columbia University. During his ongoing studies, James Velissaris received several scholarships and took on several jobs on campus in order to pay his tuition fee. He was a part of religious clubs and other various student groups.

The beginning of James’ career took its speed when he joined Goldman Sachs as an analyst. He then moved to Arden Asset Management, where he conducted analysis on asset allocation and portfolio construction. Here he worked on research and published about diversified statistical arbitrage.

He went on to work for TPG Capital founding partner David Bonderman’s $3 billion family office, Wildcat Capital Management. At Wildcat, he managed uncorrelated investment strategies.

When people talk about volatility, many times they focus on short term volatility, says Velissaris. While short volatility has performed quite well over the last ten years, Velissaris believes diversified volatility will be especially crucial as the market enters its later stages. The diversified approach aims to provide exposure across equities, FX, and single stocks on the Vega neutral side.

Financial Marketers must take the lead to understand how a user’s experience differs from one touch-point to another and advocate for integrated user experiences. It will allow users to get what they need, at every step, in their customer journey of interacting with your financial product.

There’s a huge number of variables when it comes to this — if you’re a branch of a banking company (for example) dealing with local customers on a daily basis, you’ll likely want to have a personalized approach where tellers can be at ease, conversational and maybe know the customers by name.

But more importantly, whether customers are at your physical location, contacting you via email, on the web, or via mobile devices — you need to speak with one voice regardless of channel.

Creating a smooth user experience has always been a challenge for financial institutions. This is one of the key aspects of understanding financial marketing in terms of user experience..

This is a challenge because while a financial institution makes a distinction between channels, customers don’t.

Users expect the same experience across the board. As a result, marketers need to take the lead and understand where processes and experiences break down in the user journey.

James Velissaris is a very well-known name in the financial industry. His qualifications speak for themselves and there is a lot that the youth of today can learn from such an esteemed individual by simply having a conversation with him about his experiences.

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