Title: Managing Director
Firm: Samuel A. Ramirez & Co.
Age: 38
Vishnu Paruchuri applies his quantitative expertise to Ramirez & Co.’s analysis and structuring efforts.
The 38-year-old brings two master’s degrees — in physics from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and in financial engineering from Columbia University — to his work. Before that, he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in India.
It’s a diverse educational background, but a central theme ties it together.
“The thing that unites everything that I’ve done in my life is math,” he said.
“Most problems can be converted into the abstract form of math, and solved, then converted back to deliver a real-life solution,” he said. “It glues everything I have achieved in my life together.”
Vishnu finished his financial engineering degree in the tumultuous time of 2008.
Even though big firms like Bear Steans and Lehman were falling, Ramirez & Co. was seizing the crisis as an opportunity. Vishnu joined the firm in 2008, and he’s been there since.
He says a veteran public finance banker at the firm, Al Quintero, steered him to the municipal structuring arena.
“The more complex, the better for Vishnu,” Ted Sobel, head of public finance for Ramirez, wrote in his nominating statement.
Vishnu developed all the firm’s modeling structures for New York City debt and tobacco settlement bonds, in addition to displaying “tremendous leadership skills,” Sobel said.
He is active in training the firm's junior personnel and in the group Asians in Public Finance.
Vishnu, who is married and raising a preschool-age child, enjoys watching and playing cricket, and dabbles in chess and tennis.
