Unlocking Liquidity in

Lucio left the buy side to start and sell two capital market FinTechs before founding LiqLok with former colleagues, clients and investors. He started his career in emerging market credit risk at Lehman in 1999 then went onto to the debt origination/structured credit desk of Credit Suisse in 2000, and went on to be a junior emerging market trader at Marathon Asset Management when AUM was $200 million, an early employee at this hedge fund, it was his first experience at a startup in capital markets. His role changed to be principally responsible for the integrity of the books across all asset classes, help optimize funding through novel structures and managing counterparty exposures he left when AUM was above $6 billion to start his first FinTech, NetDelta, in 2005 to address the issues endemic to the Credit Derivative Market. There he first pitched to Mark Davies who ran Credit at Bear Sterns who is now an advisor and our 2nd largest (repeat) investor. After a year, Lucio sold the controlling interest to his lead investor a publicly traded electronic trading platform. His 2007 patent for pooled credit risk US8781952B1 was a precursor to the distributed ledger but for credit risk. In 2011 he co-founded LMRKTS with Sandeep Karkera (Sunny) where he eventually hired Josh. LMRKTS introduced the concept of portfolio trading to macro markets, namely trusting a third party with your exposures and pricing and entering thousands of trades en masse in a session to the plurality of parties’ mutual best interest. At LiqLok he aims to apply this unprecedented efficiency to maker risk transfer (trading) vs. credit risk transfer (post trade portfolio or balance sheet optimization). No third party reduced risk by adding trades before LMRKTS introduced the concept to the market and since then, no third party reduces risk since then without adding trades: a methodology that significantly lowers financial contagion from a bank’s failure forever improving stability in financial markets and a perfect complement to Emir and Dodd Frank (think of the impact of Credit Suisse’s recent failure vs. Lehman/Bear/Merrill). He exited from LMRKTS in 2018 and it remains the largest reducer of FX risk and leverage in the world. LMRKTS was acquired in late 2021 by a consortium investment of their largest clients: Citi, JPMorgan and State Street. Lucio holds a degree from Columbia University in Economics, Environmental Biology and Pre-Medical Sciences, is a conservationist and an avid outdoorsman.

Sandeep Karkera has over 23 years of experience ideating, coding, developing and implementing technological solutions in financial markets. He has a unique and demonstrable history of advancing operational strategies with a solid technological foundational to drive organizational growth and harnessing the evolving and expanding power of technology to create new capabilities and optimize existing ones. Sandeep co-founded LMRTKS leveraging his expertise to create a novel portfolio trading and compression platform where participants would enter over a trillion dollars of derivatives notional a run, providing roughly half that amount of leverage reduction and billions of risk reduction, thousands of trades, in less than 20 minutes. With this data applying computer processing power and new fields of math a single session could represent 20% of market’s monthly volume in this derivatives asset class with just a fraction of the market makers, currency crosses and maturities. His commitment to LMRKTS success was evident as he worked with the team to build the company, sell the company, and then worked over 9 months with the acquirer, Capitolis to ensure a smooth transition and further improve both offerings. Sandeep started his career building Standard and Poor's Index computation Engine. He then spent 10 years building real-time risk and trading algos for Susquehanna’s Equity Options desk, where he learned the ability to process a large number of trades in a brief period of time without a single error. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering and a Master’s degree in finance from Temple.

Joshua Litven has spent his career applying mathematical techniques to addressing inefficiencies in the market. Joining the fintech startup LMRKTS in 2017, he worked with Lucio and Sunny leading development of a multilateral optimization service which reduced financial firms’ largest counterparty exposures and subsequent costs. He received his Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia where he worked on developing parallel algorithms to simulate realistic collisions between highly deformable objects. In practice, this meant watching lots of virtual bunnies collide. Seeking a change of scenery, he set his sights for Kunming, China where he taught mathematics. There he became captivated by the field of data science as a career path that could leverage his analytical skills to help the world with information overload. His research interests include parallel computation, numerical optimization, interactive recommendation systems and music discovery.

Jasmeet specializes in quantitative analytics and development with over 16 years of experience. He is a strong ambassador of data-driven decision-making and has developed tools enabling trading, sales, and research to access data easily and draw meaningful conclusions. Previously with Natwest, he led the Quant Analytics India team responsible for developing and maintaining FICC’s relative value trading tools and indicators. Jasmeet holds has a B-Tech degree from IIT Kanpur, a Certificate in Quantitative Finance (CQF), and is a certified Financial Risk Manager (FRM) by GARP US.

Mark Kaplan is a 30-year veteran of emerging markets and capital markets technology sales. Mark’s focus has always centered around improving market infrastructure, aiding or disrupting traditional voice markets through designing and implementing new technology. He has covered banks through three decades of defaults, elections, economic cycles, new products and technologies. Since the Mexican Peso Crisis of 1994, Mark not only opened offices in Latin America but launched hybrid trading platforms in 1997 for Mexican fixed income, 2001 for Mexican interest rate swaps, 2009 for Chilean interest rate swaps, 2011 for Colombian interest rate swaps, and LATAM/Asian Non-Deliverable Forwards (NDFs) in 2012. These remain the dominant EM platforms; it is this experience of seeing things from theory to market practice has him serve as head of EM sales at Liquidity Lock. After 20 plus years at ICAP, Mark became a partner at XP Inc., expanding their US presence and supervising the rollout of their novel institutional trading platforms. Mark has a B.S. in accounting from Pennsylvania State University and a Master’s Degree in finance from Fordham University and is an avid skier.

Stephan Montes is a Queens-Born (Let’s Go Mets!), South Florida-raised member of the Liquidity Lock team, serving as the Chief of Staff & Head of Business Development. He started his career at Morgan Stanley, followed by three and a half years at Hayfin Capital Management on both the investment and business development sides of the firm. He attended Columbia University as a first-generation college student and holds a bachelor’s degree in financial economics.

Chakradhar is a full stack engineer with a strong foundation in computer science and extensive experience in building scalable solutions across web and mobile platforms. Passionate about fintech, he thrives on leveraging cutting-edge technologies to deliver impactful solutions that address real-world challenges and drive industry transformation. He has prior experience working in multiple domains including ed-tech and marketing-tech.

Shreyansh Kaushik is a frontend developer with 2+ years of experience, specializing in JavaScript, React, Nest.js, and Next.js. He leads the development of responsive, user-friendly web applications, with expertise in full-stack development for industries like e-commerce and finance. A BITS Pilani graduate, Shreyansh is passionate about solving real-world problems through technology. Outside of work, he enjoys hiking, cooking, and swimming.

Zach has 8 years of experience developing software and algorithms for financial networks, aerospace, logistics, & encryption in both the private sector and the DoD. His contributions include enhancing satellite constellation resilience, optimizing Air Force operations/logistics, and fundamentally changing high-security military encryption management systems. He is also an experienced surfer and a globe trotter.