Prof. ARİF ORÇUN SÖYLEMEZ

Biography

Dr. Söylemez has 16 years’ practical and academic experience in the fields of ‘economics’, ‘finance’ and

‘management’ gained at various institutions extending from think-tanks (both in Turkey and in the US) to a

Banker-1000 company, from a multinational asset management firm to academia. During that time, Dr.

Söylemez has worked as a i) portfolio analyst, as an ii) economist, and as an iii) academic, dealing with both

investments markets and products along with international finance, financial econometrics, strategy and corporate

finance.

He was formerly an economist at İş Bankası where he was responsible for making macroeconomic forecasts

and analyses for both internal and external clients of the Bank. At that position he has also participated in

two due-diligences as one of the representatives of the Bank (once at an international syndication and then

at an international securitization deal). Dr. Söylemez has also worked for the asset management arm of the

gigantic Dutch financial group ABN Amro, where he was a portfolio analyst. In that capacity, he had a more

quantitative job description and worked on some high-end statistical and data science techniques to improve

the risk-adjusted performances of mutual fund managers.

Dr. Söylemez has experience in the think-tank sector as well. In the think-tanks he has worked for, Dr.

Söylemez has constantly produced political economy reports for high-caliber clients from the circles of

bureaucracy and politics – both in Turkey and in the US (including the heads of some of the bureaucratic

institutions of the State of Massachusetts).

Fourthly, Dr. Söylemez has been a consultant for some M&A boutiques in the past where he worked with

the teams of both the buy-side and sell-side in some highly successful deals. His main responsibilities as a

consultant usually included making macroeconomic forecasts, conducting financial analysis and participating

in negotiations.

Dr. Söylemez currently works as a professor of economics at Marmara University. He was a visiting

researcher at Harvard University in Spring 2020. The Professional and academic honors that Dr. Söylemez

has received to date include the following: i) he is one of the former recipients of the Dan Searle Fellowship

and ii) the HEC Excellence Scholarship rewarded by the Paris Chamber of Commerce. He is an iii) invited member of the Massaschusetts chapter of the International Economic Honor Society ODE. 

Dr. Söylemez’s latest book on foreign exchange rates has been published by Routledge in February 2021.