Less than a year after he joined Cerberus Capital Management, former J.P. Morgan data science chief Afsheen Afshar has made an unexpected exit from the private equity firm.
Cerberus has already hired another J.P. Morgan alumnus, Benjamin Sylvester III, to take over Afshar’s announced mission of building a new data science platform for Cerberus. Afshar joined Cerberus only last November 2017. The reason for his departure was not revealed.
Sara Butcher reported on efinancialcareers.com:
“Afshar’s exit comes as Cerberus is stocking up on ex-J.P. Morgan data talent. Matt Zames, the former chief operating officer of J.P. Morgan, was named president of Cerberus in April 2018. Len Laufer, the former head of J.P. Morgan’s intelligent solutions team joined the fund earlier this year, and may well have been behind the arrival of Ben Sylvester. Sylvester has both a trading and a technology background. He joined J.P. Morgan in 2008, originally as head of U.S. equities trading at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. In 2013, he became head of platform strategy and development at JPM Asset Management. And in 2015 he became head of corporate and investment bank and asset management solutions. Sylvester left JPM this July.
“As we reported earlier this year, J.P.Morgan has been losing machine learning talent ever since disbanding its intelligent solutions team. Not everyone has gone to Cerberus: Graham Giller, went to Deutsche Bank in March, David Fellah, went to fintech firm ITG in London in April, and Rajesh Krishnamachari left for Bank of America Merrill Lynch in the same month.”
