Jim has served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Greenwich Hospital and Greenwich Health Services for four years and currently sits on the Hospital’s board as well as the board of the Yale-New Haven Health System. He is also on the board of Blyth Inc., a NYSE listed company. Jim holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.B.A., both from the University of Washington.

Roberto Mendoza
Roberto is a co-founder and was Chairman of IFL. Previously, Roberto spent over 30 years at J.P. Morgan, where he served as a Vice Chairman of the Board, from 1990 to 2000. During his tenure at J.P. Morgan, he was principally involved with the firm’s corporate finance, M&A and private-equity functions.

Roberto serves on the boards of Western Union, Inc. and Paris Re. He is a previous Chairman of XL Capital Ltd. and Egg plc, and has served on the Boards of ACE Limited, Banesto S.A., the BOC Group plc, Continental Airlines, Inc., Mid Ocean Limited, Prudential plc (Chairman of the Remuneration Committee), Reuters plc, the Travelers Group, and Vitro S.A. Roberto holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.B.A. (Baker Scholar) from the Harvard Business School.

Robert Merton
Robert is a co-founder of IFL. In 1997, Mr. Merton received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in recognition of his contributions to modern finance theory and practice. He is currently the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at the Harvard Business School. Prior to joining the faculty of Harvard in 1988, he served for 18 years on the finance faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. Mr. Merton is past President of the American Finance Association and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Previously, Mr. Merton served as a senior advisor to the Office of the Chairman at Salomon Inc. In 1993, he co-founded Long-Term Capital Management and served as a principal until 1999, when he became a senior advisor to J.P. Morgan. Mr. Merton holds a B.S. in Engineering Mathematics from Columbia University, an M.S. in Applied Mathematics from California Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds honorary degrees from University of Chicago and five foreign universities.

Brian Burwell
Brian joined Marakon in 1979 – a year after its founding – and has more than 25 years of experience working with senior executives at some of the world’s leading companies. He has advised clients on issues ranging from business unit and corporate strategy to large-scale transformation. His experience has spanned six continents and numerous industries, including retail, distribution, consumer products, financial services and pharmaceuticals. Prior to arriving at Marakon, Brian was a research manager with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and an economist with a research group at the University of California.

Brian is a member of the Dry Creek Valley Winegrowers Association in California and is heavily involved in youth sports and charitable organizations. He holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of California and an M.B.A. from Stanford University.

Ken Favaro
Ken was founding member of Marakon's London office. From 2000 to 2006, Ken served as Marakon's Chief Executive. He has over 20 years of experience working with business leaders on the key challenges and opportunities they face and his clients span a variety of industries – financial services, consumer products, healthcare, heavy manufacturing, retailing, media and telecommunications, among others – in North America, Europe and Asia. Ken recently co-authored the book The Three Tensions: Winning the Struggle to Perform Without Compromise.

Ken is a director of Marketocracy, an Internet-based money management firm, and an active alumnus of his undergraduate and graduate institutions. He is also on the board of the Glover Park Group. He holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Stanford University (Phi Beta Kappa) and an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business (Arjay Miller Scholar).

Peter Hancock
Peter is a co-founder of IFL. Peter spent more than two decades at J.P. Morgan, serving as the firm’s CFO and chairman of its Risk Management Committee from 1999 until 2000. From 1996 until 1999, he served as global head of Fixed Income. During that time, he was given added management responsibility for the firm’s $150 billion credit portfolio. Over the next two years, he led a successful re-allocation of 25% of the firm’s capital from low-margin credit extension to more productive uses, including a $3 billion stock buyback. In 1990, he founded J.P. Morgan’s respected and highly successful Global Derivatives group, which he ran until 1995.

In 2004, International Financing Review awarded Peter a special recognition for his contributions to the derivatives markets – one of only four such IFR readers’ awards in the journal’s 30-year history.

Peter holds an M.A. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University. He has lived or worked in New York, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong.