Brett Whysel
Brett Whysel is a Co-Founder of Decision Fish. With over 30 years of experience in Wall Street, he built a reputation as a leading quantitative analyst, new product developer, and manager. As a former investment banker to municipalities and large nonprofits, he created the Risk First Framework, a decision-making process to help his clients make better financial decisions. Whysel is also a Lecturer at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, teaching intro to finance, corporate finance, and managerial decision making. He speaks publicly and writes extensively on finance, behavioral science, philosophy, and related topics.
Brett Whysel Professional Experience / Academic History
Professional Experience
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Contributor
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Co-Founder
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Adjunct Lecturer
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Managing Director
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Director
Academic History
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Master of Arts in Philosophy
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Bachelor of Science in Managerial Economics and French
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French Language and Civilization Diploma, Advanced Commercial French Diploma
- Whysel began his public finance career in 1988 at Merrill Lynch.
- He taught Public Economics and Decision Making and the Capstone at the City College of New York MPA program.
- He is a gallery-exhibited photographer.
- He contributes to Forbes’s leadership channel on behavioral economics, finance, and philosophy.
- He runs the 1,000 member Behavioral Economics-NYC Meetup.
- He has appeared as a guest on Real Vision.
Risk First Framework
- The Framework includes a step-by-step process that helps risk-averse institutions decide on the best investing, borrowing, and hedging strategies for them.
- It uses behavioral economic principles to get better results: slow people down and cause them to think deeply about goals and risk tolerances.
- The rationalized process helps limit the effects of sub-optimal heuristics like choosing the default, going with the herd, and excessive risk aversion.
- It also includes a linear optimization model that produces a rank ordering of alternatives to speed the decision process.
- The Framework is transparent, robust, and repeatable to facilitate stakeholders' buy-in.
- He led the risk analytics effort of the public finance department, performing asset-liability studies, research and development, plan of finance consultations, and information management.
- He worked with a wide range of healthcare systems and municipalities and authored a series of white papers on capital market dynamics and product developments.
- His innovations have had an industry-wide impact:
- a reduced basis risk structure for interest rate swaps
- the first asset-liability model to apply modern portfolio theory to debt and derivative management