About Us

CEO and Co-founder

Todd has 20+ years of experience in leading and managing high growth FinTech businesses.

His passion is solution and business building and he has a proven record of taking de-novo concepts and fledgling businesses and developing them into industry warping leading positions. With a focus on helping tier-1 global financial services firms - the largest and most demanding customers in the most heavily regulated industry - manage their risk and regulatory obligations, quality of a team-wide execution were absolution requirements.

It is Todd's belief that execution will be the primary difference in who wins with blockchain, crypto, and machine learning technologies. New innovation is crucial, but without the right team that can execute, innovation can never achieve its potential.

Executive Chairman and Managing Partner

Raffi Festekjian is the Executive Chairman and Managing Partner of Empyrean Solutions and Nuarca LLC.

His responsibilities include managing the strategic direction of these high growth Fintech companies and looking for acquisition and investment opportunities.

Prior to his current endeavors Raffi Festekjian was the President and CEO of the Finance, Risk & Compliance Solutions group of Wolters Kluwer GRC Solutions. His responsibility included  the overall strategic direction of enterprise risk management, consumer compliance, financial crime, investment compliance and insurance lines of business.

Prior to joining Wolters Kluwer, Festekjian was a co-founder of PCi, which specialized in addressing fair lending, Community Reinvestment Act, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and predatory lending requirements. Under his leadership, PCi became one of the largest providers of compliance solutions to the financial services industry.

Earlier, Festekjian was a consultant and investment banker. He has a background in product management and civil engineering.

Festekjian received a Master of Business Administration, with distinction, from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

CTO and Co-founder

Jamil Azher is CTO of Nuarca focusing on technology strategy and execution.

Jamil has over 25 years of experience in software development and technology management. Most recently, he worked as Principal Architect, Machine Learning & IoT for Microsoft in Silicon Valley.

During his career, Jamil worked with Fortune 100 companies in Financial Services, Hi-Tech Manufacturing, Healthcare and Retail sectors, advising them on Enterprise Architecture and IT Strategy.

Jamil is also the author of several books on Application Lifecyle Management.

He received a Master’s degree in Information Technology from Harvard and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Caltech. Jamil lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is also involved in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in South Asia.

EVP Product Management

JB Sloan joins Nuarca from Pegasystems where he served as product manager for the Sales Automation and Customer Services solutions for Financial Services.  While there he managed the development and launch of the customer service chatbot solution for Facebook Messenger.

JB has 15 years of product management experience in the financial services sector in areas such as compliance management, enterprise risk management, sales and customer service.

JB has a Masters of Information Services from Northeastern University.  He has worked with many of the top fifty global banks helping them develop and implement software solutions.