2022-12-16 What Is Lars Thinking ("WILT")

Submitted by Lars.Toomre on Fri, 12/16/2022 - 06:00
1979-10-31: Bessie, a steer from Saugus’ Hillstop Steakhouse out for a “Walk Aboutl” on MIT Campus

As some are aware, Lars Toomre is the Managing Principal of a FinTech “skunkworks” group that goes by the name BRC FinTech Corporation (“BRCF”). [Nota Bene: If one follows the URL links to www.brcfintech.com, Google and some other search engines report that the BRCF website is a security risk. It most certainly is not, but the warning simply is a result of serving web pages with a http:// base rather than the current day's best practice of using https://.]

At present, the About Brass Rat Capital FinTech Team webpage publicly lists only four members. There are more and about a dozen people affiliated with a BRCF-affiliate Brass Rat Capital LLC will be meeting this afternoon to discuss some plans to make a more public presence known in early 2023.

As some might note, for about a dozen years, Lars has used as his avatar on his personal Facebook page, a gift he received from one of his MIT fraternity brothers, Gary Fitzgerald. It is the image of an American fighter aircraft “going vertical” with an orange sky background highlighted by the setting sun.

Gary, who I knew as that “kid” from Uniondale H.S. on Long Island, went on from MIT with an Aeronautical Engineering degree to join another elite fraternity, that of American fighter aircraft pilots. Hats off to you, Gary, and to the other MIT Beta Gamma chapter members of the ATO fraternity, who elected to serve in the American military. The American military forces certainly benefited from your intelligence and service for the greater good!

Lars has been stubbornly pursuing his current objective for about a dozen years as well. This has been without receiving anything more than token compensation. It has been a quite frustrating and at times lonely journey, especially as family and friends have asked “Why? Why do not you get another `real` job again with one of what are described as one of the financial whales?”

For those who are unaware, the first couple paragraphs of Lars’ professional biography read as follows:

Lars Toomre leads the BRC FinTech Corporation ("BRCF") team from Florida. He has had many pratfalls (and a "wee bit" of experience) as a "geek" focused on uniquely adding value to financial firms and their business units. Lars organizes and helps teams to optimize Economic Value Added ("EVA"). He serves as a thought leader and trusted advisor for issues that involve ontologies (think "semantic" meaning of data objects), valuationsanalyticsrisktechnology, and financial data.

At major financial firms including Lehman BrothersMetLifeUBSCitigroup and Munich Re, Lars focused on assessing, modeling, analyzing, pricing, underwriting, transacting in, and managing risk, often involving new and/or challenging financial risks, like Collateralized Mortgage Obligations ("CMOs"), weather condition derivatives, and risk securitization.

In his senior roles (head of business levels) at those major institutions, Lars gained the crucial experience needed to manage books of risk on both assets and liabilities sides of institutional balance sheets, and to manage the liquidity and other complex risks of such arcane instruments. In particular, Lars is proud of his role in creating the first "cutting and dicing" of MBS pass-throughs ("Investors GNMA Trust 1983-1") and going on to run the CMO/ABS Trading Desk at Lehman Brothers for much of the 1980s.

Lars' specific areas of expertise include digital transformationontologiescomputational finance, complex financial engineering models, algorithmic regulationmachine learning models, mortgage-backed securities ("MBS"), asset-backed securities ("ABS"), reinsurance, risk securitization, insurance-linked securities ("ILS"), and other complex transactions, including transformations between securitizations, multi-class securities, derivatives and/or contracts of insurance.

Lars’s more recent focus has keenly targeted the 2008 "Great Recession" meltdown and how to prevent mortgage risk from again threatening the livelihoods of so many on Main Street. Since 2013, Lars has been working closely with Object Management Group ("OMG") to create software standards and ontologies. 

Much of what will be discussed today among the BRCF team will expand on what Lars discussed at the 2019 MIT Chief Data Officer / Information Quality Symposium (“MIT CDOIQ”). This recording of his interview at that 2019 CDOIQ event helps to explain why the BRCF group has chosen to use the rather odd name of Brass Rat Capital. Today, the BRCF team is getting ready “to go wheels” and proverbially “fly” – vertical of course!

It is going to be a very good day – and a long time in coming. Lars has had the good fortune to be among and work a number of other good teams and groups, including as a leader of the Lehman Brothers CMO Trading Desk and Origination business and as a member of the MIT ATO fraternity chapter.

That particular ATO chapter might be able to share some “hypothetical” details about how a certain “Bessie”, a large plastic steer that now resides in the MIT Museum, somehow wandered from a certain Hilltop Steakhouse north on Route One is Saugus to the top of the MIT Great Dome on the night of October 31, 1979. As daylight broke the next morning, traffic on Memorial Drive, the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge, and Storrow Drive was at a complete stand still. Apparently, everyone was amazed that those “kids” from MIT somehow figured out how to get a cow to the top of that very visible dome and now prominent Boston area landmark.

I know certain of my fraternity brothers thought the hack of Sheraton Hotel across the Charles River was better. [Somehow that Sheraton hotel next to the Prudential Center always had “problems” with its large, maybe twenty-foot, high lights on the side of the hotel that faced MIT only on the weekend that included the start of MIT Fraternity rush. We never could explain why the “S”, “H”, “E”, “R” and “N” letters always seemed to fail at once.

My own real-time brother, Erik, who also graduated with a Mechanical Engineering undergraduate degree, joined that MIT ATO fraternity as a “brother” when I was a senior. I was elected as the fraternity chapter President my final senior semester and Erik was elected as the chapter treasurer that same semester. Recently, one of Erik’s pledge class members shared the attached image which may lay false Lars’ claims, like Sargent Schultz on the TV show Hogan’s Heroes, that “I know NOTHING!!”

Lars can confirm that the fellow on the left of the image bears some resemblance to back in the day when a certain MIT undergraduate student wore braces on his teeth throughout much of his college years. That fellow also wore a similar Newton North High School athletic jacket with the several varsity sport pins and patches indicating membership on seven Massachusetts state championship teams.

It is an amazing feeling to proverbially “fly” with a proverbial “best-in-class” team. Many people never ever have the chance to experience such a high of true achievement. Fewer people have experienced such a “high” again with a second or even third separate team. Lars is blessed to have another team which is about to go “vertical.”

Enjoy this day and take a moment to reflect that this is the anniversary date of what was the most deadly battle for American soldiers in the European Theater of World War II – The Battle of the Bulge. Many relatively young American lads lost their lives in that extremely cold winter during the week plus that it took General George Patton’’s U.S. Third Army to turn north. The Third Army’s Second Arrmored Division eventually relieved the siege of Bastogne where the American 101st Division was valiantly defending the key cross roads intersection. Thank you for your sacrifice so that others may continue to soar!

Finally, I would like to acknowledge my parents, Joyce and Alar Toomre, for their support during these past dozen years. Thank you, Mom and Dad! Stephanie Leigh McGillivray and her father, Robert Dettmer, deserve recognition for their quiet support as well as that of a certain fun, red-headed realtor named Patti Fine. Thank you, because I most definitely could never fly again without your belief in me and your support and encouragement.