Yacamy is a word in tupi-guarani, a native South American language still in use by some tribes in the continent, that means "genius" or "creative".  The firm was established in 2016 by a group of high caliber financial professionals coming from top Wall Street and City of London investment banks, top strategy consulting firms, Federal Reserve and Big 4 consulting. This group of people met through time in their own professional life as Chief Risk Officers, Chief Accounting Officers, consulting firm partners, senior federal examiners, etc. and, as the landscape of the financial industry changed significantly with tremendous challenges, we thought that we would put our skills in better use to be more  entrepreneurial and set up our own shop, where we would be able to put our experience and skills to use and help financial institutions, other than those that we work for, to cope with these challenges. 

Marcelo Cruz, PhD, Managing Partner

​Nivaldo Hernandez, Partner

Marcelo Cruz is the Managing Partner and a co-founder of Yacamy Advisors. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Operational Risk and adjunct professor at the New York University. Previously he was the Executive Vice-President and Chief Risk Officer at Ocwen Financial Corporation and had equivalent roles at E*Trade in New York City and Aviva plc in London. He also was a Global Head of Risk Management at Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and UBS. In his consultant career he worked as an associate Partner at McKinsey & Co, and before that he was the Managing Director and founder of RiskMaths a boutique consultancy focused on risk management and strategy.

Before moving to risk management Dr. Cruz worked as a chief economist/strategist for an investment bank and as a derivatives trader for JP Morgan where he was in charge of structuring and trading financial derivative products.

​Marcelo Cruz is recognized worldwide in the financial industry as a leader in operational risk and one of the top names in risk management. He is a member of the board of many publications and industry associations and a sought-after speaker in many seminars and conferences in several countries. He wrote the first academic article on operational risk in 1998 and has published many articles on the subject since then. He wrote the best seller book on operational risk (“Modeling, Measuring and Hedging Operational Risk", Wiley 2002). He wrote/edited other books in risk management. His last book, published in 2015 by Wiley, "Fundamentals of Risk and Insurance Analytics" is already being used as a textbook in graduate courses several top universities. He was a member of the Industry Technical Working Group that helped to develop the new Basel Accord. He was also a Trustee of the Board of GARP and currently sits on the Research Committee of PRMIA.

He holds a PhD in Mathematics by the Imperial College in London, a M.Sc. in Financial Mathematics, an MBA and a B.Sc. in Economics.

Nivaldo Hernandez is a Partner and co-founder of Yacamy Advisors. He is a senior executive financial services expert with extensive experience in the operation, organization and management of international Finance teams responsible for the support of Front, Middle and Back Office activities for global investment banking organizations. His 20 plus years of employment history includes positions as Senior Vice President, Executive Director, and Audit Senior with such entities as Ocwen Financial, E*Trade Financial, Morgan Stanley, CIBC World Markets, Bankers Trust (now Deutsche Bank), and EY. 

Nivaldo is particularly adept in successfully leading multi-functional areas from ERM, Operational Risk and risk reporting to derivatives settlement and product control. Nivaldo headed the Enterprise Risk Management department at Ocwen Financial and Operational Risk Management at E*Trade where he rolled out their firmwide risk frameworks. He also led the team responsible for the development of risk data collection and accuracy for Morgan Stanley’s Operational Risk modeling department. Nivaldo strives for innovative, data driven approaches to risk management in an effort to quantify risks in terms that justify the measures to contain them and reduce subjective risk factors. 

As Executive Director at CIBC, Nivaldo led the effective implementation of a risk capture system that saved the firm upwards of $120 million in regulatory capital charges. He then consolidated and streamlined the market and credit risk reporting responsibilities globally in New York and London improving both performance and transparency.

In prior positions, Nivaldo collaborated in the creation of the Bankers Trust Section 20 broker/dealer start up company and developed their financial and regulatory accounting process. He went on to become the assistant to the COO where he worked on the re-engineering and rationalization of the global operations process workflow and technology infrastructure. 

Nivaldo is a graduate of the prestigious Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University and holds a B.Sc. degree in Accounting.