Mehraj Mattoo

Mehraj Mattoo (महराज मट्टू ) is a British investment banker, economist and author; currently a Senior Fellow at Harvard University. He is the Co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth Asset Management. According to the UK and Cayman Islands company records, Commonwealth Asset Management is majority owned by NR Investments, the investment vehicle of the Rothschild Family. Before co-founding Commonwealth, Dr. Mattoo was Global Head of Asset Management at Commerzbank AG, leading one of the largest hedge fund and private equity groups globally (Investhedge 2009; The Billion Dollar Club). Prior to Commerzbank, Dr. Mattoo was the Managing Director of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, the investment banking arm of Dresdner Bank AG, the second largest bank in Germany. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Mattoo co-founded the first fund derivatives group in the City at BNP Paribas, the largest French/global bank by assets. He is widely credited for pioneering the use of structured products on alternative investments, especially hedge funds, that helped attract institutional assets to the hedge fund industry and contributed to its explosive growth over the following decade. In the early 1990s, Dr. Mattoo established and led the Structured Products business at NatWest Markets, the investment banking arm of Britain's largest bank, National Westminster Bank, now part of RBS Group and led an educational effort aimed at promoting responsible use of derivatives by corporations and institutional investors.

Dr. Mattoo raised eyebrows when, in 2005, he established a Computational Intelligence group in the City headed by Prof. John G. Taylor, a Cambridge Physicist and a widely recognised expert in the field of artificial intelligence in Europe. Commerzbank was also reported to have launched a joint research programme with Imperial College that aimed at creating artificial intelligence models for use in asset allocation. Commerzbank claimed significant performance gains from the programme.

Dr. Mattoo was born in India but was educated at Britain's Imperial College. He holds MSc and PhD (Financial Economics) degrees from London University. He was the inaugural NatWest Research Fellow at Imperial College (1986–1989) and a Visiting Research Scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Dr. Mattoo is a leading commentator on alternative investments and a known critic of the traditional asset management model. Dr. Mattoo is the author of Structured Derivatives published by the Financial Times, London (1997) and a co-author of books on interest rate risk management and alternative investments. He is also a recipient of the Diploma of Imperial College (DIC).

In 2015, Dr. Mattoo was appointed Advanced Leadership Fellow at Harvard University. In 2016, he was appointed a Senior Fellow.