Navaid Abidi is a serial entrepreneur and has, over the past decade, served in executive roles in frontiers of financial economics, from algorithmic high frequency trading, to global portfolio management, to investment benchmarking, to financial planning through all phases of life.
Abidi has a passion for applying financial economics for meaningful betterment of the lives of ordinary people. His financial technology innovations are currently being used by some of the largest financial institutions for benchmarking of the global investment managers and retirement guidance in 401(K) plans for over 1 million Americans. He is a philanthropic investor in social enterprise projects that span Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Abidi has served on the board of directors of the Human Development Foundation, a non-profit organization that operates development programs for some of the most marginally deprived communities in South Asia. While serving on the board of HDF, he traveled extensively to the program sites and supervised creation of data driven program evaluations, and adaptive change control management system for the organization.
Abidi has a B.S in Electrical Engineering from Milwaukee School of Engineering and graduated Beta Gamma Sigma with an MBA in Analytic Finance and Econometrics from Chicago Booth. Navaid serves as a Mentor to graduate students at the Harris School of Public Policy, and is the current President of the Chicago chapter of the Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs of North America.