Management Team
Dave Zaret — Chief Executive Officer, Founder
Dave Zaret founded Symphono in 2002 and is an industry leader in financial collaboration technology.
Dave started his career at Swiss Bank/O’Connor in Chicago, developing real time arbitrage and risk management systems for the equity derivatives team, and soon led the firm in developing new technologies that leveraged local pockets of expertise to build a global enterprise. Specifically, Dave helped develop tools to allow thousands of traders globally to “share the book”, integrating the strength of collaboration systems (chat rooms, email, text messaging software) with both trade execution and compliance software.
Dave used his expertise in collaboration systems and his knowledge of the capital markets to start Symphono. Since 2002, Symphono has built a strong presence in the financial technology arena and continues to build on this success.
Dave holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Engineering from the University of Michigan.
Bob Schmitt — Chief Technology Officer
Bob is the Chief Technology Officer at Symphono and oversees all client delivery. He is responsible for the continual development and enhancement of methodology to assure consistent, robust and timely delivery for all client products and services.
Bob specializes in delivering technology solutions that solve complex financial problems. Bob draws on his 15 years of financial knowledge, from UBS and Bank of America, to provide leading designs of sophisticated financial systems.
Bob's project management, change management, and governance skills help deliver important features to ease the migration of legacy systems to modern architectures. Bob has led teams through several software development life cycle processes including Waterfall, Agile, Rational Unified Process, and Six Sigma.
Bob holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science / Mathematics from the University of Illinois.
Drew Shields — Chief Product Officer, Partner
Drew is Chief Products Officer, leading Symphono’s product development efforts, bringing two industry-leading products to the market: Symphono Analytics and Symphono Trading System X (TSX).
Drew started his career at Bank of America, holding multiple positions in interest rates and credit derivatives at Bank of America. During his tenure at Bank of America, he worked in a variety of roles for the derivatives technology organization. He has experience managing large-scale development projects, overseeing technical support teams, and serving as the technology liaison to business support and middle office.
Drew holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in Theology from Moody Bible Institute and an MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Adam Weyeneth — Chief Financial Officer
Adam is a key contributor to the development of Symphono products, innovating and validating market need that guide the strategy of the product suite.
Adam started his career at UBS, working with various risk departments, then moved to a team that researched emerging technologies for application in the UBS infrastructure, this role ultimately led to Adam serving the investment analysts in the investment banking unit.
Adam then moved to work at Barbary Coast Capital Management and also was the founder and COO of Fair Deal Credit, LLC, a proprietary investment partnership focused on making loans in the emerging peer to peer lending space.
Adam holds a Bachelors of Arts in Economics from Northwestern University and was the Class of 2005 Gary S. Becker Distinguished Fellow at The University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business. Adam received his MBA with Honors in 2005, with concentrations in Accounting, Statistics and Econometrics, and Analytical Finance.
