About Us
Saphyre was imagined, articulated, designed, and built by a dedicated team with a wealth of experience from the finance, technology and design industries.
Origin Story
In 2017, Gabino Roche Jr. founded Saphyre to create a real-time, shared client account data management solution. The founding team built and patented revolutionary technology that remembers and automatically reshares data and documents previously provided between counterparties with established trading relationships.
In the beginning, Saphyre offered solutions for expedited account onboarding and management, now part of “Saphyre1.” These new solutions normalized and mapped the unstructured data and documents captured and created a shared system of record between financial firms, addressing several major pain points for financial institutions. However, it was also this platform that created an AI-powered infrastructure as a foundation that could be further leveraged more broadly for additional finance administration and operations processes.
Customers quickly adopted Saphyre’s groundbreaking technology and in 2024, just in time for the new T+1 regulations, Saphyre extended its offering with a suite of solutions for more efficient post-trade processing, dubbed “SaphyreX,” leveraging data setup with Saphyre1 to help their client’s achieve real-time settlement.
Today, Saphyre ensures clients are always ready-to-trade with real-time solutions for real-time settlement. Saphyre is used by some of the largest global financial institutions to fuel revenue growth, improve operational efficiency and drive trade volume while also improving customer satisfaction and reducing compliance risk.
Executive Team
Gabino Roche
Gabino Roche
Gabino has 20+ years of experience building products for Fortune 500 companies. Previously, he was the NYSE Managing Director leading application development and Senior Vice President at JP Morgan delivering a $40M product Custody portfolio & revamping the CIB’s KYC/AML operational processes. Gabino was also a former McKinsey & Company member focused on delivering products faster to market and Head of Product managing an $80M budget at Clarient Global, a FinTech startup consortium – partly owned by JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, State Street, Credit Suisse, Barclay’s, and DTCC.
Stephen Roche
Stephen Roche
Stephen has 15 years of business development and sales experience in the IT Solution space. Previously with AT&T, he has helped to streamlined complicated Global IT infrastructures for Fortune 1000 companies and has established cloud SaaS offerings with hosted ERP & ecommerce platforms to realize roughly a $1M+ in quarterly earnings. Stephen also previously managed relationships and closed multi-million dollar opportunities with firms such as: The New York Yankees, Wyndham Hotels, Red Bull Racing, Axis Capital & Volvo. He was consistently ranked top ten for seven years with AT&T as lead Client Solutions Executive.
Eli Ungar
Eli Ungar
Eli designed and executed the current financial operating systems as well as financial reporting, scenario modeling, strategizing, accelerating cycles, contracts, capital raise reporting, investor relations and reporting, and projections relating to short term and long-term objectives. Eli is the financial steward for Saphyre and oversees the financial health and well-being of the company.
Michael Brandi
Michael Brandi
Michael’s 20+ years of executive management exposure, combined with his experience bringing SaaS platforms to market provides Saphyre with the skills to meet demanding compliance-finance requirements. Michael leads Saphyre’s technology team with expertise in Cloud Architecture, Data Security and Organizational Design.
Michael Linchitz
Michael Linchitz
Raymond Shivers III
Raymond Shivers III
Ray is an experienced lead with a demonstrated history of execution, innovation, and integration in the financial services industry. Ray has more than 20 years of broad financial and management experience, most recently as COO of Lincoln Investment.
Kelly Downing
Kelly Downing
A founding employee, Kelly helps shape the vision and delivery of intuitive, client-focused products that address critical industry needs. Kelly has 15 years of experience transforming complex systems into simple, effective solutions, previously leading strategy, research, and design initiatives at institutions such as T. Rowe Price, American Express, Wells Fargo, MetLife, ADP and MIT.
Michael Patulo
Michael Patulo
For over 15 years, Mike has been dedicated to providing timely and accurate service to clients. With a rich background that includes tenures at Morgan Stanley and Barclays in New York City, as well as Northern Trust in Chicago, Mike has spearheaded transformative initiatives and teams within operations, client service, and project/risk management.
Mike leverages his extensive knowledge of trade and account lifecycle management to enhance process efficiency and team performance and is a firm believer in the power of simplicity and consistency to achieve superior and more impactful results.
Dean Shamsi
Dean Shamsi
Dean has 18+ years of experience designing and developing performant and powerful applications, has deep expertise in application design using proven principles and cutting edge technologies, with emphasis on service-oriented and microservice architecture.
Max Lamb, CFA®
Max Lamb, CFA®
Max brings a deep knowledge of the investment space, with a 25 year career including leading global client transitions and transition manager research for the global investment consultancy WTW, where he worked on behalf of many of the largest asset owners and pension funds to deliver optimal outcomes from their dealings with custodians, investment managers and capital markets firms. Earlier in his career Max ran currency hedging and transition mandates at LGIM, a top 15 asset manager, and worked at Northern Trust, the global custodian.
Max joined Saphyre in 2021 from Insight Investment where he sat on the operations leadership team with responsibilities and interests including onboarding, transitions and introduction of a workflow engine. He works with investment managers, asset owners and custodians to understand their needs and introduce them to the Saphyre platform.
Board of Directors
Michael Cichowski
Michael Cichowski
Partner and Co-Head of Ascend.
Neal Pawar
Neal Pawar
Neal is a global business leader with a highly technical and quantitative upbringing.
Most recently he was President, Head of Asset Management at Clearwater Analytics (NYSE:CWAN). He joined via the Clearwater’s acquisition of Enfusion (NYSE:ENFN) where he was Chief Operating Officer. Enfusion is a high-growth software-as-a-service provider focused on transforming the global investment management industry.
Neal has held senior operating roles on the buy-side of Investment Management including as a Partner and CTO at quantitative firms D. E. Shaw & Co, and AQR Capital as well as global operating roles as CIO of UBS Wealth Management and Group CIO of Deutsche Bank. Most recently he was COO and interim CEO of Qontigo which was created in 2019 through the combination of Axioma, the indexing business DAX/STOXX. In 2023 these businesses merged with Simcorp and ISS (all part of the Deutsche Börse Group).
Luis Machuca
Stephen Roche
Stephen Roche
Stephen has 15 years of business development and sales experience in the IT Solution space. Previously with AT&T, he has helped to streamlined complicated Global IT infrastructures for Fortune 1000 companies and has established cloud SaaS offerings with hosted ERP & ecommerce platforms to realize roughly a $1M+ in quarterly earnings. Stephen also previously managed relationships and closed multi-million dollar opportunities with firms such as: The New York Yankees, Wyndham Hotels, Red Bull Racing, Axis Capital & Volvo. He was consistently ranked top ten for seven years with AT&T as lead Client Solutions Executive.
Gabino Roche
Gabino Roche
Gabino has 20+ years of experience building products for Fortune 500 companies. Previously, he was the NYSE Managing Director leading application development and Senior Vice President at JP Morgan delivering a $40M product Custody portfolio & revamping the CIB’s KYC/AML operational processes. Gabino was also a former McKinsey & Company member focused on delivering products faster to market and Head of Product managing an $80M budget at Clarient Global, a FinTech startup consortium – partly owned by JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, State Street, Credit Suisse, Barclay’s, and DTCC.
