Dr. Vinay Nair is a serial entrepreneur and a leading academic. He has started or is involved as an advisor or board member in several companies in financial services, across investment management, venture capital and fintech. He is also involved in technology-enabled solutions that link Israel, India and the US. He is the Founder and Chairman of The Tifin Group, a platform to create and manage a portfolio of fintech brands and companies in areas of investments, wealth management and asset management, as well as Founder and Chairman of 55ip, a fintech firm providing wealth managers a platform to build investment strategies, with offices in Boston and Mumbai, India. Nair is also a visiting professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Nair began his career as a faculty member at The Wharton School as an Assistant Professor of Finance. He has also taught courses at INSEAD, Columbia University, Indian School of Business, and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. He founded a fintech platform for investment advisors and tax management and remains chairman. In 2018, he formed a fintech venture studio to build scalable businesses for the investment arena; its first spin-out company is a natural language search platform to find and buy financial products. Nair founded Ada Investments in 2010. He was named a hedge fund rising star by Institutional Investor in 2012. FINalternatives noted that Ada Investments' investment approach grew from Nair's original academic investigations, and uses fundamental and behavioral insights to identify return drivers in equity markets. In 2014 XL Group acquired a minority stake in Ada Investments. Nair founded 55 Capital in 2015 with Lee Kranefuss. Ada Investments was sold to 55 Capital Partners, a firm helped launch, in June 2016. Prior to founding Ada Investments, Nair was a research director and portfolio manager at Old Lane Partners, a fund acquired by Citi Alternative Investments. In 2008, Nair authored Investing for Change, published by Oxford University Press, on the use of social variables in investment management. He is a regular speaker at financial conferences across the globe on topics including financial engineering, behavioral economics, and sustainable investing.
