The SCIC Team

Urmila is a research analyst for SCIC where she has done financial modelling of capital adequacy for CABEI, developed a capital model for OFID, and helped validate the valuation methodology for complex CDS and CDO transactions for Finantia.

An applied mathematician, Urmila's modeling work focuses on ecology, development, and finance, including dynamic programming, optimal control, differential equations, stochastic modelling, graph theoretic models, statistical models, and machine learning. She has done research on water projects in the developing world and ecosystem carbon sequestration. Her clients have also included Philadelphia Global Water Initiative, Water for People, Project Drawdown, and Development Gateway.

Urmila is also a Research Associate at the Academy of Natural Sciences. She was a Research Associate at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2012-2013), an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at St. Olaf College (2004-2010) and a post-Doctoral research associate at University of California, Davis (2002-2004).

Dr. Malvadkar holds a Ph.D. and an MA in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Princeton University and a BS from Vanderbilt University in Mathematics and Environmental Science.

Mr. Weinberger focuses on credit risk and ratings, advising both institutional investors and issuers of debt securities. He is also technical advisor and a member of the rating committee of Zumma Ratings, a credit rating agency based in El Salvador and covering the Central American region, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of TurkRating, a credit rating agency based in Istanbul, Turkey. As Senior Financial Advisor at SCIC, he has worked on a number of credit advisory assignments since the firm's founding in 1999. Mr. Weinberger has held senior positions with two international rating organizations. As Director of International Business Development at Thomson Financial BankWatch, he contributed significantly to the formation of new rating agencies in the emerging markets of Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe, and provided ongoing technical support and training, including participation on rating committees. Previously, as Managing Director - Corporate Ratings with Standard & Poor's Corporation, he conceived and initiated the now common concepts of "CreditWatch" and "Credit Outlooks," prepared the first guide to rating agency practices ever published, and developed the first platform for electronic delivery of ratings and analyses. In earlier assignments with S&P, he managed the firm's industrial, utility and financial institutions rating activities and its entry into new rating areas, including international and structured finance. Mr. Weinberger was intimately involved in the formation and organization of S&P's first international ratings joint venture in partnership with the Stockholm School of Economics. Mr. Weinberger is a past president and director of the Fixed Income Analysts Society, Inc. and is a member of The CFA Institute and The New York Society of Security Analysts. On NYSSA's behalf, he developed a course on Corporate Credit Analysis – Concepts and Techniques.

Mr. Weinberger holds a Master degree in Business Policy from Columbia University, New York.

Dr. Nye is a former rating agency analyst at Moody's Investors Service in the public sector unit where he specialized in sovereign and bank ratings. Previously he headed the international evaluation department at Atlantic Richfield Company in Los Angeles and was responsible for evaluating the company's foreign investment projects from the standpoint of country risk. Mr. Nye has spent over thirty-five years assessing the economic and political factors that affect growth, stability and financial health of countries and municipalities as well as financial institutions around the world.

He has published more than three dozen articles and books on investment related topics and addressed numerous public and private forums on sovereign and municipal finance. His latest book, a definitive volume on ratings published by Euromoney in 2014, is titled Understanding and Managing the Credit Rating Agencies. Dr. Nye has advised ministries of finance, central banks, subnational governments, private sector corporations and financial institutions. He has undertaken many donor-funded assignments (ADB, IBRD, USAID, SIDA), trained host-country nationals in credit-related activities, and has participated in the State Department Speakers Program.

Dr. Nye holds a Ph.D. in international relations from Washington University and a B.A. in political science from Williams College.

Ms. Davis has been an independent financial advisor for the past two decades advising investment banking boutiques, mortgage brokerage firms, overseas real estate developers, and bond insurers on emerging market securitizations and structured financings. Her expertise includes transactions backed by overseas workers' remittances, export-backed loans, future flows, IFC "B" loan syndications, synthetic products, international trade receivables, etc. With SCIC since 2005, she has advised commercial banks such as Access Bank and Ecobank Transnational Inc. as well as supranationals such as OFID.

Previously, she worked for two years at Santander Investment Securities Inc. on Latin American export-backed loans and for two years at Asset Guaranty Insurance Company, where she executed the first bond-insured overseas workers' check remittance securitizations. She came to Santander from McGraw Hill / Standard & Poor's, where for ten years she held increasing responsibilities including as a foreign bank credit analyst for banks in Scandinavian countries as well as in Belgium, Canada, Netherlands, and Spain. At S&P she also worked as an emerging markets structured finance analyst.

Ms. Davis holds a B.B.A. in finance from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has advanced Spanish language proficiency.

Dr. Ruth DeFord is the Chief Administrative Officer of SCIC. Since 2012, Dr. DeFord has also been a Senior Research Analyst responsible for peer group analyses of financial institutions, including supranationals, banks and insurance companies. She has worked on quantitative rating analyses of such SCIC clients as: AFC, BOAD, EADB, CABEI, OPEC Fund for International Development, Ecobank Transnational Inc., Access Bank (Nigeria), Wapic (Nigeria), etc.

Dr. DeFord is Professor Emerita at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she taught for over thirty years and was the Chairman of the Hunter Music Department for six years. Dr. DeFord's book Tactus, Mensuration, and Rhythm in Renaissance Music was published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press. It received the Wallace Berry distinguished book award from the Society for Music Theory in 2016.

Dr. DeFord holds a Ph.D. in Music from Harvard University and a BA in Music and German from Oberlin College. She is proficient in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, and can read French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Mr. Pirnie is a multisector credit ratings expert, focusing on Africa. He has been assisting SCIC on African bank ratings advisory work since early 2019. Until 2018, he worked for nearly two decades at Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services (now S&P Global), most recently as the lead analyst for African ratings. His primary responsibility was for African banks, insurance companies, multilateral development banks, sovereigns and corporates.

Matthew was responsible for ratings on the African Development Bank, African Reinsurance Corporation, the Republic of Botswana and Standard Bank of South Africa, among others. He also rated Nigerian banks, the first Basel 3 compliant subordinated debt issue out of South Africa, and the new African Bank Ltd. (South Africa) at the commencement of its resolution. He has also rated a significant number of companies going into and emerging from a default or a distressed restructuring and is a specialist on debt covenants and their consequences.

At S&P, Matthew chaired the credit committees for emerging market ratings, which focused not only on African but also on Brazilian, Indian and Chinese credits, particularly banks and non-bank financial institutions.

Since 2008, Matthew has lived in in South Africa, where he now advises South African asset managers and government bodies on ratings, banking resolution regimes and debt capital instruments. He is also developing internal ratings models for such clients and is currently updating and rewriting ratings criteria for an emerging markets rating agency based in South Africa.

Matthew holds a BA from the University of Manchester and an MSc from the University of Southampton.