Chief Executive Officer – Chelsea Avondale

Nilesh Vasani

Nilesh is the Chief Executive Officer
& founder of Chelsea Avondale.

Nilesh has an exceptional track record of building industry leading reinsurance operations that are rooted in deep technical risk analysis. His passion for risk modelling & portfolio management have provided the technical foundation to ensure the success of the companies he’s built, and also helped to identify the opportunity to bring advanced risk modelling to the primary insurance industry, leading to the creation of Chelsea Avondale.

Nilesh has an extensive background in executive roles at industry leading reinsurers & asset managers. Prior to founding Chelsea Avondale, Nilesh was CEO of BMO Reinsurance Ltd., a major property & casualty retro reinsurer, and a key subsidiary of the renowned banking group Bank of Montreal. Nilesh was instrumental to building the business to over $800 million in annual premiums via a measured scientific underwriting approach, responsibly expanding into new, highly complex lines of business, while ensuring rigorous quantitative risk management.

Nilesh also founded and served as CEO of Empyrean Re., a Bermuda based credit reinsurance provider with over $150M in capital. Empyrean’s success, even through the market crash of 2008, was driven by its extensive capabilities in credit risk modelling and entrepreneurial provision of reinsurance capacity to the under served credit risk insurance markets in Europe.

Nilesh has also served as Head of the Global Alternative Investments business at BMO Global Asset Management (with $15 Billion in AUM), worked with J.C. Flowers in the private equity space, and was Head of the Credit & Financial Products business within the reinsurance arm of Royal Bank of Canada. Nilesh was also one of the cofounders of Athene Re, a precursor to Athene Holdings which today has over $80 billion in assets and $5.5 billion in equity.

However, Nilesh’s executive roles are overshadowed by his technical capabilities. He pioneered the development of bespoke mathematical risk models that underpin the balanced composure of his underwriting & asset management portfolios. He has extensive experience in parlaying the intricacies of proper risk packaging into computer engineering, and in designing systems structures to optimize flexibility and speed. Nilesh has written over 100,000 lines of code in the past few years alone and continues to conduct extensive research of scientific methodologies and works on the software development of our most critical systems components.

Nilesh is respected as an industry leader in the areas of scientific risk modelling, risk management systems design and reinsurance portfolio management. He has an Honours BSc in Statistics and Actuarial Science from The University of Western Ontario, and has done extensive research in the fields of quantitative risk analysis and mathematical finance.