Model ML hires former Evercore Director to lead Tokyo push

Model ML has appointed former Evercore Managing Director Carol DeWolf as Director, Tokyo, as it expands in Asia Pacific with a new Tokyo office and plans to grow its regional team to 30.

DeWolf will lead relationships with Japanese financial institutions as the artificial intelligence software provider adds staff across Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong. It opened its Tokyo office in September as its ninth global location, alongside its existing base in Singapore.

She brings experience across Japanese and international financial markets. DeWolf spent seven years at Evercore, where she covered US institutional investors from New York before moving to Tokyo in 2023 to lead Asia Pacific institutional coverage.

Before Evercore, she held sales and client roles at Nomura Asset Management, Daiwa Securities Capital Markets, Nomura Securities and Lehman Brothers. She joins a regional leadership team that includes Eli Auerbach, General Manager, Tokyo, and Kat Chen, General Manager, Singapore, who joined earlier after eight years at Goldman Sachs.

Demand from banks, asset managers, insurers and private capital firms across the region has driven the hiring push. Model ML provides AI tools for research, due diligence, analysis and document creation for financial and professional services firms.

Its software works in more than 30 languages, including Japanese, and is designed to route tasks to different client-approved AI models depending on security and data requirements. Each number in an output can be linked back to a source document, and the platform records which model handled each task.

Regional growth

The expansion comes as financial institutions in Asia Pacific face growing pressure to strengthen oversight of AI use. Recent guidance from the Monetary Authority of Singapore on AI risk management and a Bank of Japan survey on AI agents and frontier models have added to scrutiny in the sector.

Model ML says its platform keeps an audit trail of outputs so institutions can show how AI-assisted work was produced. That focus on traceability is central to its pitch to regulated financial firms adopting AI tools for core workflows.

The company also disclosed strong commercial growth in the latest quarter. In the third quarter, annual recurring revenue rose 250% quarter on quarter, while daily active users increased elevenfold. Some 57% of users were in the product every day.

Its clients include HSBC, PwC, Deloitte, EY, FT Partners and five of the 10 largest global asset managers, according to the company. In Asia Pacific, its client base now spans investment banks and asset managers, with additional large institutions in discussions.

Local presence

Chaz Englander, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Model ML, said the company had seen particularly strong feedback from clients in the region. "I came back from Asia in September with a longer list of things to build than I've had from any other trip. Our clients' teams in Tokyo and Singapore are putting together agents and workflows we haven't seen in London or New York, such as connecting extensive priority content sets built and maintained in-house, as well as more formal regional context and nuances around Japanese tone, culture and other key areas. The feedback that comes with them is detailed and fast. For us, the best way to act on that feedback is to have our people go to our clients' offices to hear it directly, and then build it into the product quickly. Having Carol, Kat and Eli on the ground is how we intend to do that across the region," Englander said.

DeWolf said adoption trends in Japan were moving faster than some outside observers expected. "Japanese financial institutions are adopting AI more quickly than is often assumed outside the market, and they are doing so with the care one would expect, with security and the reliability of every output as the first considerations. Over my career covering institutional investors in Japan and the US, I have seen that lasting relationships here are built through consistent presence and through delivering on what has been promised. Model ML has made that commitment to the region, with teams based in Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong working directly alongside clients. I am excited to join at this stage and to support our clients in Japan as they bring AI into the core of their work," DeWolf said.