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Our Team

Rick Grove

Partner and Chief Executive Officer

Rick Grove

Partner and Chief Executive Officer

Rick Grove is a Partner and the Chief Executive Officer of Rutter Associates LLC, the New York based financial markets risk management consulting firm.  Rutter Associates’ consulting practice encompasses a wide range of financial markets risk management and valuation advisory work for financial institutions, corporations and regulators in the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.  In addition to managing Rutter Associates, Rick’s own practice focuses on derivatives and structured credit products.  He has acted as a consultant and expert on a variety of disputes being mediated, arbitrated or litigated in New York, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Stockholm and Taipei.

Rick has spent over 30 years working in the financial markets, as both an investment banker and a lawyer.  From 1997 to 2001, he was the CEO of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA).  Following ISDA and before joining Rutter Associates, Rick was a Managing Director at Bank of America, co-managing the Global Commodity Derivatives Group.  Prior to joining ISDA, he worked as a marketer in the fixed income and derivatives businesses at Paribas Capital Markets and headed the Financing Desk and the Fixed Income Syndicate Desk in New York.  Rick originally joined Banque Paribas as General Counsel of Paribas Corporation after practicing capital markets, mergers & acquisitions and general corporate law with Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York and London.

Rick is a member of the panel of experts of P.R.I.M.E. Finance, the financial markets dispute resolution service based in The Hague.  Rick has served as Co-chair and Senior Advisor to the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Financial Engineering for Economic Development.  He has served on the CFTC’s Global Markets Advisory Council and the World Bank’s Financial Markets and Development Conference Advisory Board.  Rick has chaired ISDA’s U.S. Regulatory Committee and has testified about the derivatives markets before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.  He has served on ISDA’s panel of experts for credit event determinations.

Rick authored “Valuation in the context of derivatives litigation” in the April 2011 Oxford University Capital Markets Law Journal and “Overview of Derivative Products” in International Financial Disputes:  Arbitration and Mediation (published March 2015 by Oxford University Press).  Rick co-authored “Business Disputes in a Pandemic:  Preparing for a Peak and Flattening the Curve” in the October 2020 Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law.  He is a member of the Geographic Advisory Board for the Oxford University Press Capital Markets Law Journal. 

Rick has taught classes on derivatives, structured credit products and risk management at Columbia University, Fordham Law School, New York University, Princeton University, the University of Massachusetts, the University of St Andrews, National Taiwan University College of Law, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (Washington), the Bank of England (London), the Japanese Financial Services Agency (Tokyo), the Practicing Law Institute (New York), the Bank of China Institute for International Finance (Beijing), China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (Beijing), the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (Wellington), the National Bank of Georgia (Tbilisi), the National Bank of Kazakhstan (Almaty), the National Bank of Cambodia and the Securities and Exchange Regulator of Cambodia (Phnom Penh), and for banks and law firms in Amsterdam, Auckland, Brussels, Hong Kong, London, New York, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Taipei, Tokyo and Washington.

Rick has conducted training sessions on the economics of financial markets transactions for the judges of the Australian Federal Courts in Sydney and Melbourne, the judges of the Supreme Courts of the states of New South Wales and Victoria in Australia, judges from the Bahamas, Jamaica and Turks and Caicos, Chilean judges at the Instituto de Estudios Judiciales in Santiago (Chile), Chinese judges at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, the justices of the Delaware Supreme Court and Delaware Chancery Court (USA), Hong Kong judges at the High Court in Hong Kong, Romanian judges at the Institutul National al Magistraturii in Bucharest (Romania), the judges of the Shanghai Financial Court, the justices of the Singapore Supreme Court, and judges in Taiwan at the Judges Academy (Taipei).

Rick is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, the bar of the State of New York, the American Bar Association’s International Law Section, the International Advisory Committee of EcoPeace Middle East, and the Board of the University of St Andrews American Foundation.  He is President of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Friends of the IISS.

Rick received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard University, where he was an editor of the Harvard International Law Journal, and his A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton University where he was enrolled in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

Bob Selvaggio

Partner and Head of Analytics

Bob Selvaggio

Partner and Head of Analytics

Bob Selvaggio joined Rutter Associates as a Partner and Head of Analytics in 2010.  Prior to joining Rutter Associates, Dr. Selvaggio was Senior Vice President and Head of Risk Analysis in Fidelity Investment’s Institutional Products Group. At Fidelity he oversaw Capital Markets risk, potential counterparty exposure, CVA and risk adjusted performance measurement. For eleven years prior to joining Fidelity, Dr. Selvaggio was Managing Director and Head of Capital Planning and Risk Analysis of Ambac Financial Group, Inc. responsible for portfolio credit and market risk analysis, economic and rating agency capital attribution and allocation, and risk-adjusted performance measurement. Prior to joining Ambac, Dr. Selvaggio served as a financial economist at Thomson McKinnon Securities, and then held a number of positions at The Chase Manhattan Bank including Senior Asset/Liability Analyst, Head of Fixed Income and Mortgage Research, and Managing Director of Treasury Analytics. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Selvaggio holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Brown University where he was a University Fellow.  Dr. Selvaggio is a member of the American Economic Association and National Association of Business Economists, and is a BAI Certified Risk Professional in Credit and Treasury/ALM.

Charles Smithson

Founding Partner

Charles Smithson

Founding Partner

Charles Smithson is the Founding Partner of Rutter Associates.  Dr. Smithson has a diverse experience set, with positions in academe and in government, as well as in the practitioner community. Dr. Smithson taught economics at Texas A&M University and served with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission before moving to the private sector where, most recently, he was the Managing Director of the CIBC School of Financial Products. Prior to CIBC, he worked at the Chase Manhattan Bank, as the developer of Chase’s education program for derivatives and as the Managing Director for Risk Management Research and Education and at Continental Bank, where he was the Managing Director for Risk Management Research. The author of numerous articles in professional and academic journals, Dr. Smithson is best known as the originator of the “Building Block Approach” to Financial Products and as the “Class Notes” columnist in Risk Magazine. He is the author of five books, including Managing Financial Risk and Credit Portfolio Management. Dr. Smithson received his Ph.D. in economics from Tulane University.

Chia-Ling Hsu

Principal

Chia-Ling Hsu

Principal

Chia-Ling Hsu is a Principal of Rutter Associates.  She joined Rutter Associates in 2006. Ms. Hsu received her M.S. in Operations Research concentrating in Financial Engineering at Columbia University in 2005. Her master’s independent project at Columbia University was to apply and implement the Brace-Gatarek-Musiela model, known as the lognormal forward-LIBOR model, to price inflation-linked derivatives. Ms. Hsu obtained both a B.B.A. and M.B.A. in Finance from National Taiwan University. At Rutter Associates, Ms. Hsu has provided independent valuation for risk management, trading, litigation and accounting purposes. These projects have involved various derivatives, including plain vanilla and complex credit, interest rate, equity and FX derivatives. She has also performed substantial modeling and valuation of cash and synthetic structured credit products, such as CLO, CDO of Corporate, RMBS, and ABS. In addition, Ms. Hsu has been involved in projects validating clients’ internal credit rating models and analyzing clients’ trading strategies. She has also worked on projects relating to U.S. bank regulators’ CCAR (Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review) and financial market benchmarks including LIBOR and ISDAFIX. She has developed a VaR demonstration model and provided scenario analysis of sample portfolios for regulator review. Ms. Hsu has been a speaker at the International Association of Credit Portfolio Managers (IACPM) Education Seminar in New York, Washington, Madrid, London, and Philadelphia, demonstrating the value of credit portfolio management using a simulation exercise. She has also been a lecturer teaching risk management for a large U.S. bank and one of the largest Chinese banks. She is a CFA Charterholder and a Certified FRM holder.

Nancy Kovacik

Chief Operating Officer

Nancy Kovacik

Chief Operating Officer

Nancy Kovacik is an attorney and the Chief Operating Officer of Rutter Associates. Before joining Rutter Associates in 2012, she practiced law at a small Long Island-based law firm for five years and most recently was the director of a franchise of an international fitness company. She obtained a BA summa cum laude from The State University of New York at Albany and a JD cum laude from Boston University School of Law.

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