Paul Pignataro is an entrepreneur specializing in finance education. He has built and successfully run several startups in the education and technology industries. He also has over 14 years of experience in investment banking and private equity in business mergers and acquisitions (M&A), restructurings, asset divestitures, asset acquisitions, and debt and equity transactions in the oil, gas, power and utilities, Internet and technology, real estate, defense, travel, banking, and service industries.

Mr. Pignataro most recently founded New York School of Finance, which evolved from AnEx Training, a multimillion-dollar finance education business, providing finance education to banks, firms, and universities throughout the world.

The New York School of Finance is a semester-long program, based in New York and geared toward helping business students from top-tier and lower-tier business schools to prepare for jobs at the top firms on Wall Street.

At AnEx Training, Mr. Pignataro continues to participate on the training team, actively providing training at bulge bracket banks and for M&A teams at corporations, and has personally trained personnel at funds catering to high-net-worth individuals worth billions of dollars. AnEx continues to train at over 50 locations worldwide, and Mr. Pignataro travels extensively on a monthly basis to do trainings at sovereign funds and investment banks overseas.

Prior to his entrepreneurial endeavors, Mr. Pignataro worked at TH Lee Putnam Ventures, a $1 billion private equity firm affiliated with buyout giant Thomas H. Lee Partners. Before that, he was at Morgan Stanley, where he worked on various transactions in the technology, energy, transportation, and business services industries. Some of the transactions included the $33.3 billion merger of BP Amoco and ARCO, the $7.6 billion sale of American Water Works to RWE (a German water company), the sale of two subsidiaries of Citizens Communications (a $3.0 billion communications company), and the sale of a $100 million propane distribution subsidiary of a $3 billion electric utility.

Mr. Pignataro is the author of Financial Modeling and Valuation: A Practical Guide to Investment Banking and Private Equity (John Wiley & Sons, 2013). He graduated from New York University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science.