About Ronald Kashden

With over 30 years working in technology, Ron Kashden has expertise in three separate “worlds”: finance/accounting, investment portfolios, and software development. He holds a degree in accounting from Lehigh University. 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.

Ron left public accounting in the early 90’s to become a software developer at HedgeWare, Inc. Hedgeware was a pioneer of software for the hedge fund industry, providing integrated trading, portfolio accounting, and investor accounting package.  The software became part of backbone IT infrastructure of 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. 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 heading software development.  S.A.C. was one of the most active trading firms in the world (with up to 2% of the street activity on some days), an environment which challenged Ron and his team to develop systems that would have virtually no downtime – requiring distributed systems with real-time updates and self-healing software

Ron switched focus back to his math and business advisor strengths when he joined the Tiedemann Investment Group. As CFO, he honed his financial skills managing the firm, which had several multi-national/multi-currency funds operating across a variety of investment strategies. During his tenure, the firm took on the task of updating their software platforms. Tiedemann had complex master/feeder and mini-master fund structures that the current offerings just couldn’t handle. As a solution to the dilemma, a new software company was formed with Ron shepherding the creation of an internal investor accounting software application.

The in-house software, Penny-it Works, was so successful at handling complex parent/child and feeder funds that other systems couldn’t, that Tiedmann asked Ron to serve as CEO of a new firm, TKS Solutions, to commercialize and market the software.

The package is a complete investor accounting solution – offering partnership accounting, shareholder accounting, and tax calculation/reporting.  Because it does what is say (it works!), Penny became the go-to software for large institutions such as Bank of New York Mellon, Brown Brothers Harriman, and State Street, as well as to complex funds such as GSO Partners (Blackstone), Eton Park, Ramius (Cowen), PIMCO, and Bridgewater Associates.  By the time TKS was sold to the Eze Software Group in 2015, 7 of the top 20 funds in the world used the firm’s software. 

In 2018, Ron left Eze and now consults with several fintech firms in addition to creating IOS apps.