About Ronald Kashden

With over 30 years working on technology, Ron Kashden is one of those unique individuals with deep expertise in three separate “worlds”: finance/accounting, investment portfolios, and software development. This dual persona can be traced back to receiving an accounting degree from a hard-core engineering university, Lehigh University. Throughout his career he’s had one foot in different “worlds”. Even while studying for the Certified Public Accounting exam, he took breaks to reverse engineer the Mac operating system, using a symbolic debugger, so he could write assembly-level hooks for the then popular Magic Menus utility from Aladdin Software.

Having a desire to merge his passions into a single job, Ron left public accounting in the early 90’s to become a software developer at HedgeWare, Inc. At the time, Hedgeware was an early pioneer of software for the then booming hedge fund industry. Their integrated trading, portfolio accounting, and investor accounting package became an essential part of a fund’s IT infrastructure. At Hedgeware, Ron was worked with firms that would become leaders of Wall Street, including: Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management, Michael Steinhardt’s Steinhardt Partners, Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp, and Grosvenor Capital Management. Leveraging his dual expertise Ron rose to become head of development and spearheaded the firm’s next generation software, Advisorware.

Hedgeware, Inc was acquired by SS&C Technologies in 1999 and Ron left to work at Steve Cohen’s S.A.C. Capital Advisors as the manager of software development. To say the environment at SAC was demanding would be an understatement. They were one of the most active trading firms in the world (with up to 2% of the street activity on some days). This rigorous environment challenged Ron and his team to develop real-time systems that would have virtually no downtime. Characteristics such as true real-time updates, self-healing software, and distributed systems weren’t academic concepts but required features.

After 4+ years at S.A.C., Ron left the firm to become the Chief Financial Officer at the Tiedemann Investment Group. As CFO, he honed his financial skills managing the firm, which had several multi-national/multi-currency funds across a variety of investment strategies. During his tenure, the firm took on the task of updating their software platforms. Being founded in 1980, Tiedemann was still running some old DOS software. Although it was easy to replace the portfolio and trading software, there wasn’t a good replacement for their back office /investor accounting. Tiedemann had complex master/feeder and mini-master fund structures that the current offerings just couldn’t handle. As a solution to the delimma, a new software company was formed with Ron shepherding the creation of a complete investor accounting solution for complex funds.

So TKS Solutions was founded and the software application, Penny-it Works was born. The software is a complete investor accounting solution that integrated with any portfolio system and had a full partnership accounting, shareholder accounting, and tax calculation/reporting. It became the go-to software for many organizations, from large institutions such as Bank of New York Mellon, Brown Brothers Harriman, and State Street to complex funds such as GSO Partners (Blackstone), Eton Park, Ramius (Cowen), PIMCO, and Bridgewater Associates. It was so established that 7 of the top 20 funds in the world used it to report to their investors.

In 2015, Eze Software Group acquired TKS Solutions to round out their product line. In 2018, Ron left Eze and now consults with several fintech firms in addition to creating IOS apps.