The hallways of the Naveen Jindal School of Management were recently filled with an assembly of quants.
The term, short for quantitative analyst, may sound futuristic, but it describes a growing profession in finance. Quants use mathematical models, statistics and computer programming to analyze markets, manage risk and build investment strategies.
Nearly 200 people were gathered in the Davidson Auditorium for Quaint Quant Conference 2025, an event that was named in part because it had started two years ago in a coffee shop with just a handful of people. The catchy alliteration also helped make it stick in people’s minds.
This year the event was sponsored by the Jindal School, Agora Data, a fintech company that uses AI and data analytics to support the subprime auto finance industry, and f(Q), the YouTube channel of Dimitri Bianco, head of quantitative risk and research at Agora.
Right before the event’s kickoff, Agora’s president and COO Matt Burke said that he and Bianco have been discussing the possibility of Agora offering internships to JSOM students.
Burke then kicked off the festivities.
“This is a really unique opportunity and looking in the crowd and hearing about how many people are really going to be here today, it’s not so quaint anymore,” he said.
Dr. Gaurav Shekhar, senior assistant dean of the Jindal School’s graduate programs, welcomed the audience.
“We are in that phase where industry and academia are sitting on the same side of the table …,” he said. “And this was not by choice, but for whatever reason, it felt like that we were two separate entities … because we were happy in what we were doing in our own spaces. We are feeling good about it and I think that fusion was needed and the fact that every other day we are having a conference, an event that is bringing that partnership on the same side of the table again and again shows that … we are interested in building the future well, and we can only do it if you work together.”
Burke said that he was introduced to The University of Texas at Dallas through Bianco and had attended the Jindal School’s FinHack conference in 2024.
“I saw what you guys are putting on with that and Dimitri mentioned, ‘Hey, can we possibly do the quaint quant with UTD?” Burke said. “And I said, by all means, let’s see how that goes.”
The conference was designed in a three-track format with one session in the Davidson Auditorium and two other simultaneous ones in other JSOM lecture halls.
Bianco moderated a panel titled “The Fintech World: Bringing It All Together” which featured Fred Viole, founder of OVVO Labs; Billy Mateker, senior director of data science at Bertram Capital; and Christina Qi, CEO of Databento. They discussed how fintech startups and investors are leveraging data — and the hurdles they face in scaling, selling, and monetizing it.
“All businesses today have reams and reams of data and very little access to data professionals at this stage that they’re in,” Mateker said. “And so you can actually, as a quantitative person, generate a lot of value for investors for those companies.”
Mateker said quants also can generate value for themselves by learning how to take data and insights at those businesses to the next level.
Another panel — “Challenges in Machine Learning for Finance” — featured experts from various sectors including wealth management, lease-to-own finance and model validation.
Moderator Raghu Venkat, chief risk and pricing officer at FinBe USA, guided panelists Jacob Bowers, vice president at BlackRock; Stan Colpacov, who leads the data science and risk analytics practice at subprime specialty financing firm Okinus Credit Solutions; Murlidhar Jutti, model risk validator at Santander Bank; and Agus Sudjianto, senior vice president of risk and technology at H2O.ai and senior advisor for McKinsey & Company. Their discussion centered on real-world hurdles in building and deploying machine learning (ML) models in finance.
“Working in the smaller company, the biggest challenge when you try to build machine learning models by all by yourself, the challenge is (you’re) by yourself, so you don’t have a luxury of having a team of people (with whom) you can speak math on a daily basis,” Colpacov said. “You are a jack of all trades who is expected to solve any problem.”
Bowers highlighted a common problem with applying machine learning in finance: the data is often noisy and difficult to model reliably.
“In financial markets, a lot of times you have significantly more noise than the actual meaningful signal,” Bowers said. “And on top of that, financial markets are non-stationary. So a lot of the statistical properties that these types of machine learning models rely on like a mean variance, other statistical metrics … those are not stationary across time. Those change (are) across time, either in response to political changes, changes in investor behavior, technological advances, all kinds of things.”
A student-focused panel — “Quantitative Minds: Navigating Your Career in Finance” — provided tips about professional development, developing soft skills and career strategies for quant professionals. Moderated by Zachary Creighton, a financial services headhunter, the panel consisted of Shambhavi Vats, vice president of market risk coverage at JPMorgan Chase; Dr. Logan Song, a part-time professor at the Jindal School who teaches graduate cloud-computing and machine-learning courses and generative AI leading consultant at Google; and Patrick Zoro, an assistant teaching professor and program manager of the MS in Financial Engineering degree program at Lehigh University.
Zoro shared a conversation he once had with a colleague about the importance of networking.
“Even though she has a job at a hedge fund, she’s always networking … I said, ‘What do you mean you’re networking? You already have a job.’” Zoro recalled. “She said, ‘No, I mean, I go out, I meet people, I set up clubs — not that I’m looking, which is great because you don’t feel that pressure that you need a job. You’re networking for the fun of it.’ And technically, when you’re networking, you should have fun, because, otherwise, people notice that you’re doing it for a purpose.”
The panel also covered the importance of learning soft skills in a profession dominated by hard skills, the need for introverts to adapt, perhaps even learn how to role-play as extroverts, to advance their careers, and the value of career mobility and changing companies as a strategy for growth.
The conference concluded with a keynote presentation by Bianco, Agora’s “quant-in-chief,” titled “Building the Quant Community: How to Be a Part of the Transformation.” His wide-ranging talk touched on his professional journey, the history of quantitative finance and the growing importance of building a quant community in North Texas.
“We’ve defined what the community is, the participants in the community,” he said. “How do we build a better community here? So students, I feel like you guys struggle the most with this, right? Because you’re like, I just need a job. Like that’s a really big goal. But you guys can give back in many ways.”
Bianco pointed out three specific things students could do to help build the quant community. First, they can network with and help fellow students; second, avoid the cutthroat mentality in which finance professionals work in finance, math and computer-science silos that are pitted against one another; third, they could help build the quant infrastructure by forming clubs, events or study groups, and even organize speaker sessions to help lay the foundation for a better quant culture.
Dr. David Shimko, a professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering was honored during the conference as the 2025 Quant of the Year. This recognition honors outstanding contributions to the quant community, highlighting innovation and excellence.
Dr. Liping Ma, a clinical assistant professor in the Jindal School’s Finance and Managerial Economics Area and director of the Finance Lab, was instrumental in bringing the conference to UT Dallas. She said it is critical to have open conversations between academia and industry since the quant jobs have been significantly transformed into much broader areas with the advancements of technology and AI.
“I’ve taught statistics, probability, predictive modeling, numerical methods in R, machine learning in Python and business intelligent tools in Tableau to our Jindal School students for more a decade,” she said. “I have received many questions from the students about what quant jobs look like, how they can work their way into this field, and what skill sets are required. I often feel that academia and industry are working in a parallel path and they both are doing fine. We needed a platform like the Quaint Quant Conference to bring together students, quant researchers, faculty, and business leaders so they can exchange creative ideas, understand real problems and connect in a meaningful way.”
Ma said that purpose motivated her to initiate the JSOM Finance Lab’s flagship program, Financial Hackathon (FinHack) in spring 2022. The competition, a social-coding event in which students attempt to solve business problems with their financial and technology skills, concluded its fourth installment April 5.
“This was our first time to collaborate with Dimitri and Agora Data, and it served the same purpose in another level,” she said. “As a professor, I was highly impressed by curiosity of students, generosity of professionals and engagement of the community. Everyone had a great time. That’s all that matters. We’re looking forward to more dialogue and collaboration with industry leaders in the future.”
