Ø Ø Our People

IFE Group is a team of widely known and highly skilled financial modelers and strategists with a wide range of diverse specialization and experience serving private and public financial institutions globally.  Each of our senior leaders has over ten years professional experience serving leading financial institutions, with hands-on experience in implementing complex tasks and strategies, and recognition as a thought leader in their field.  We have published over seventy articles in academic journals and professional magazines.  We are unique in that we provide truly “integrated” financial engineering solutions by bringing together in-depth understanding of the details of model development and implementation, cutting edge modeling skills and knowledge, and diversified expertise in multiple domains associated with financial institution operations.

Leadership Team

Tyler T. Yang, Ph.D., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, has over twenty years of experience in mortgage analytics and portfolio credit risk management. His specialties include managing risk-based capital, pricing mortgage derivative securities, designing and implementing hedging instruments, and developing automated portfolio risk management reports. He has published numerous articles in top finance and real estate journals and frequently gives speeches at domestic and international professional meetings. Dr. Yang is active in several academic and industry organizations, and is currently the Executive Director and an ex-President of the Asian Real Estate Society. He also serves as a co-editor or an associate editor for several leading finance and real estate journals.

Dr. Yang was previously a Sr. Director of Credit Portfolio Engineering at Freddie Mac, a Director of Housing Finance at Price Waterhouse, a Sr. Research Economist at Fannie Mae, and has taught at California State University at Long Beach and George Washington University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Finance and M.Arch. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Barry L. Dennis, President and Chief Operating Officer, has been a leader in the area of financial and economics consulting for over thirty years. He has provided consulting services to both private and public sector clients, working in the areas of financial analysis, economic analysis, policy analysis, and simulation modeling. He has extensive experience in the design and analysis of financial instruments, portfolio and enterprise risk management, quantitative analysis, and simulation modeling. He has worked with many of the world’s largest financial institutions, including commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and hedge funds, as well as many of the world’s largest asset managers. He also has a great deal of experience working with government agencies dealing with financial instruments and markets.

Mr. Dennis was previously at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) for 24 years. While in the PwC Washington Consulting Practice, Mr. Dennis was Partner in charge of the Asset Securitization Modeling practice, the Public Sector Housing Finance practice, and the Financial Risk Management practice. While in the PwC Transfer Pricing practice in New York City, Mr. Dennis was the lead Financial Services Economist, co-leader of the Financial Services Transfer Pricing Practice, and global leader of the Insurance Transfer Pricing Practice. Prior to PwC, Mr. Dennis was a financial economist in the Office of Tax Analysis at the U.S. Department of Treasury. Mr. Dennis has a M.A. Degree in Economics from the University of Maryland College Park.

Sandy S. Wang, MBA/CPA, Vice President of Finance and Operation, has over thirty years experience in business operation and management. Her specialties include financial reporting and analysis, taxation, compliance, accounting system development, database management, and treasury. She has a diversified working experience in the accounting, technology, banking, consulting, and import/export industries both domestically and internationally.

Ms. Wang previously worked for large corporations such as Coventry HealthCare, Principal HealthCare, Marriott International, and KPMG Peat Marwick as well as smaller companies such as FHP and ISS. Ms. Wang received her MBA degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a Certified Public Accountant.

Lead Consultant

Phelim Boyle, Ph.D., FIA, FCIA, Actuarial Consultant, is an actuary who specializes in financial risk management. He also has extensive experience working with Canadian mortgage insurance programs and the actuarial-based capital models. He is a pioneer developer of the modern financial engineering profession and has been recognized as the Financial Engineer of the Year by the International Association of Financial Engineers in 2005.

Charles A. Calhoun, Ph.D., Econometrics Modeling Consultant, has over twenty years experience in academics, policy research, international organizations, private industry, and the federal government. His expertise includes mortgage default and prepayment modeling, house price index construction, risk-based capital modeling and policy analysis, and statistical and demographic analysis. Dr. Calhoun has served as a domestic and international consultant and has testified as an expert witness in federal courts. Recent consulting engagements include: Farmer Mac, The Urban Institute, The World Bank, Countrywide Credit Industries, and the Government Housing Bank of Thailand. Dr. Calhoun frequently presents papers at domestic and international conferences and has published articles in leading economics, statistics, and demographic journals.

Henry J. Cassidy, Ph.D., Risk Management Consultant, has over thirty years experience in leading and managing various business functions for financial institution including trading and asset-liability management, financial and economics modeling, and portfolio risk management. His specialties include financial portfolio management, loan underwriting process and scoring, asset securitization, and product development. He frequently gives speeches at professional meetings and has published many articles in leading economics journals and a textbook in econometrics.

Dr. Cassidy was previously a Senior Vice President of Freddie Mac, a Director of Federal Home Loan Bank Board, a Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institute, and has taught at Virginia Polytechnic University and George Mason University.

Ren-Raw Chen, Ph.D., Financial Modeling Consultant, has over twenty years modeling experience covering credit risk modeling, the term structure of interest rates, and continuous time asset pricing. He has published papers in major finance and professional journals. He also has implemented pricing models for financial companies, including credit derivatives pricing models for Lehman Brothers, structural default models for Moody’s KMV, convertible bond and fixed income derivatives models for Grand Cathy Securities Corporation, and a two-factor HJM model for Polypaths Software. Dr. Chen's modeling capabilities range from deriving closed form solutions, solving PDE, implementing Monte Carlo simulations, and carrying out complex calibrations.

Other Senior Consultant

David Andrukonis, MBA, is a widely respected senior mortgage executive with 25 years experience in firm wide interest-rate, credit and operational risk management as well as capital deployment. He served as Senior Vice President of Capital Deployment, Chief Enterprise Risk Officer and Chief Credit Officer at Freddie Mac.

Joseph Blalock, FRM. has extensive experience in dealing with nonperforming loans and distressed assets. His specialties include risk management, accounting, and regulatory issues related to financial institutions’ risk management and use of derivative financial instruments and other securities in asset/liability management. Mr. Blalock frequently publishes commentary articles in banking practices and give speeches to financial professionals. Mr. Blalock received his MA in Economics from the George Washington University. He was previously with Price Waterhouse, America’s Community Bankers, RTC, and FSLIC and is a certified Financial Risk Manager.

Richard J. Buttimer, Jr. Ph.D., has over fifteen years experience in mortgage and fixed income finance modeling. His specialties include mortgage and mortgage default pricing, mortgage servicing rights valuation, financial risk management, and derivative security pricing and analysis. He has published numerous articles in top finance and real estate journals. Dr. Buttimer is active in many academic finance and real estate societies, and regularly presents research at both domestic and international conferences. Dr. Buttimer also serves either on the editorial board or as an associate editor for multiple real estate journals.

William Handorf, Ph.D., has been a professor of finance and real estate with The George Washington University for over thirty years and serves as a director with the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta. He has written over 400 articles, papers, monographs and books related to finance, economics, real estate, and general business. He is the editor and principal author of a book entitled International Banking, which is published by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. He writes Financial Markets and Highlights monthly (www.gwu.edu/~sbpm/news/indicators.html). Dr. Handorf has worked as a commercial banker with the National Bank of Detroit, as a bank regulator with both the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, been an Army officer and a consultant to accounting firms and central banks (e.g., Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Ukraine, and USA). In addition, he was a director with the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (Baltimore Branch), and often serves as an expert witness in legal cases related to finance, real estate, and banking.

James J. Johnson, has over 30 years hands-on experience in the US real estate mortgage industry with emphasis on mortgage production and risk management, especially mortgage credit policy and underwriting, property appraisal, loan document management, quality control, operational risk management, counterparty risk management, and fraud investigation and recovery.

Michael LaCour-Little, Ph.D., is a Professor of Finance at California State University at Fullerton and an Associate Director of its Real Estate and Land Use Institute. His main research interest is real estate finance and he currently serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals. He was previously Adjunct Professor of Real Estate Finance at Washington University in St. Louis and an executive at Citigroup and Wells Fargo prior to joining the faculty of Cal State-Fullerton in 2006. From 2003 to 2008, he also served as Executive Vice President of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association. He has published more than twenty articles on housing finance and mortgage markets in peer-reviewed academic journals, including Real Estate Economics, The Journal of Banking and Finance, The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, The Journal of Housing Economics, The Journal of Real Estate Research, The Journal Fixed Income, and elsewhere. A native of California, Professor LaCour-Little earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of California. He has more than 10 years experience in various management positions at Wells Fargo Bank and Citibank.