FAS Solutions, LLC was founded in 2005 by Daniel Abrams from NERA (a Mercer company), Peter Suzman from Smith Barney, and Lisa Epstein from SunGard. FAS Solutions offers a unique combination of practical experience and sophisticated mathematical modeling in providing auditable valuations for ASC 718 reporting and Compensation Committee decision-making. FAS Solutions passes thousands of valuations successfully through audit each year for companies from non-public and micro-cap to Fortune 100. Some of America’s largest and most highly scrutinized companies rely exclusively on FAS Solutions for their equity compensation valuations. We service clients with total market cap exceeding $1.2 trillion dollars.
Daniel Abrams
Daniel Abrams is a founder and managing partner at FAS Solutions, LLC, a leading provider of equity compensation valuation and consulting services and financial reporting support to hundreds of corporate clients from non-public and micro-cap companies to members of the Fortune 100. Daniel is nationally recognized in the areas of valuation, risk management and compensation consulting. He has published articles and been interviewed and quoted on the subject of valuation and equity compensation by the Financial Times, CFO magazine, Bloomberg, Corporate Finance Week, Risk Magazine, Compliance Week, Pension and Investments Magazine and Treasury and Risk Management Magazine. Daniel is the author of the AFP Guide to Valuing Employee Stock Options. Daniel is a frequent speaker at annual conferences including NASPP, the Association for Financial Professionals, and the Securities Industry Institute at the Wharton School. Prior to co-founding FAS Solutions, Daniel was a Senior Consultant for NERA Economic Consulting, a Mercer, Inc. company, and a Senior Economist for the Law & Economics Consulting Group. In addition to his work in the area of equity compensation, Daniel has over twenty years of industrial valuation experience from engagements with public and non-public companies. He has valued a diversity of illiquid assets, both marketable and non-marketable. He has developed financial valuation solutions for some of the largest litigations in the insurance and financial sectors. Daniel also worked as an analyst for IBM and he was on the team that developed the first collateralized mortgage obligation information service at Trepp & Company. Daniel was a lecturer at the Cornell University Mathematics Department where he did graduate work in mathematics and computer science. Daniel also taught at Yale University economics and business school as part of the doctoral program in economics.
Peter Suzman
Peter Suzman, who graduated from Harvard Law School with honors in 1984, has over ten years of hands-on experience in the compensation and benefits industry, and has written, spoken and consulted on legal, accounting, tax and benefits aspects of plan design, option valuation and FAS 123, including presenting at the NASPP annual conference. He also has very extensive practical experience with FAS 123, having performed complete FAS 123 reporting (including parameter estimation) over multiple years for over 300 public companies. Peter lectured in Computer Science in South Africa and was a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory before graduating from Harvard Law School. He then practiced securities and corporate law at a large law firm in Boston before, in 1992, co-founding and providing the initial funding for AST StockPlan which became the first full-outsourcing stock administration firm. AST StockPlan grew to service over 250 public companies using the software that Peter designed. Smith Barney then acquired AST StockPlan in 2000 and Peter became an executive in Smith Barney’s Stock Plan Services group. Peter was the primary designer for the FAS 123 and FAS 128 modules for Sapphire, Smith Barney’s new stock administration software. Peter was responsible for FAS 123 reporting for over 150 clients at Smith Barney over a four year period.
Lisa Epstein
Lisa Epstein has over twenty years of accounting and corporate level treasury experience. Most recently Lisa was Corporate Controller at Sungard eProcess Intelligence. Previously she held positions at companies ranging from start-up to Fortune 500. She was Corporate Controller and Assistant Treasurer at EIS International and Senior Accountant at Seagrams. Lisa was licensed as a CPA in 1984 and has an MBA from NYU Stern.
Yisong Tian
Dr. Yisong S. Tian, an Associate Professor of Finance at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, has researched extensively in the area of option pricing, executive compensation, volatility estimation and forecasting, and capital market efficiency. He has published in academic journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Banking and Finance, Financial Management, Journal of Derivatives, Advances in Futures and Options Research, Journal of Futures Markets, Financial Review, and Journal of Financial Research. He has also published a monograph and a textbook on derivative securities. His research won several prestigious awards including the AAII Best-Completed Ph.D. Dissertation Award at the 1993 annual meeting of the Financial Management Association, the 1994 Toronto Society of Financial Analysts Award for best research paper, and the Best Conference Paper Award at the 2001 annual meeting of the Northern Finance Association, and the 2003 Barclays Global Investors Research Award. He currently teaches MBA and Ph.D. courses on derivatives, fixed income securities, and executive compensation.
George Jiang
Dr. George J. Jiang, an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Eller College of Management, University of Arizona, has researched extensively in the area of option pricing, volatility estimation and forecasting, interest rate modeling, evaluation of mutual fund performance, and capital market efficiency. He has published in academic journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Financial Econometrics, Journal of Computational Finance, Econometric Theory, and Journal of Derivatives. He currently teaches investments and empirical methods in finance.
Sam Serle
Sam Serle is an expert in the field of financial and tax accounting with extensive knowledge in both equity and fixed income applications. In roughly a decade, Sam rose quickly from a licenced CPA at the associate level at Topping Kessler, a leading Florida public accounting firm, to leadership positions as Financial Secretary of a major Florida charitable organization, CFO of CJ Power Systems in central Florida and most recently CFA for a leading player in the Florida financial capital sector.