In May 2022, Erik Zoega helped announce a change that founders can spend a great deal of energy postponing: somebody else would become chief executive of the company he had helped build. Russell Feldman, IMTC’s chief operating officer, would take the job. Zoega would become president. There was new funding, too, led by Nyca Partners. But the revealing detail was how long Zoega had been thinking about the person who would succeed him.
He had, he said, “envisioned passing the torch to him for many years.” In the usual choreography of a corporate announcement, the future arrives looking freshly negotiated. Here was a founder saying he had been preparing for it. Feldman had worked alongside him through the company’s development. The change put an existing working relationship into a different arrangement.
Four years later, Zoega’s public working life includes another arrangement with a younger chief executive. At Pasaana, a mortgage technology company founded in 2024, the CEO is his son, Christian. Erik is co-founder and president, responsible for partnerships, commercial strategy and taking the product to market. The family connection supplies the headline. The division of work supplies the plot.
The paperwork had a business model
To understand the handover, it helps to understand the work. IMTC makes software for fixed-income investment managers. Its territory includes constructing bond portfolios, deciding how to rebalance them, managing orders and checking constraints. These are consequential activities with a considerable administrative appetite. A bond may promise regular payments; the process of managing a portfolio of them is less obliging.
In April 2019, while Zoega was CEO and the business still used the name CBXmarket, it introduced an optimization module built around that difficulty. It accommodated illiquidity, transaction costs and minimum trade sizes. Users could encode their own guidelines and targets across more than 350 security and portfolio metrics. The engineering concerned the awkward particulars that a general model could overlook.
Security and portfolio metrics available for custom rules in the optimizer announced in April 2019.
Zoega’s commercial argument was equally particular. Fees were under pressure as passive products gained ground. Investment firms needed to improve their processes without endlessly adding manual work. Automation had to help teams make decisions and carry them out. The proposition required understanding both a manager’s investment intentions and the tiresome details that could prevent those intentions from becoming trades.
A holiday letter, with interest rates
There is a small personal detail in Zoega’s introduction to the 2019 Industry Outlook. He described taking a step back over the holidays to consider the preceding twelve months. His inventory of 2018 included France winning the World Cup, the Eagles winning their first Super Bowl, Apple reaching a trillion-dollar valuation and Virgin Galactic’s first crewed venture into space. The list ranged well beyond a bond desk.
Then he turned to the year ahead. Monetary policy, stock-market volatility, economic indicators and technological change all entered the picture. His recommendation was that investors take an active approach to managing their businesses as well as their investments. The report’s cover called 2019 the year of the active manager. Even the holiday reflection had arrived with an action item.
That December, CBXmarket changed its name to IMTC. Its NOVA platform covered US and international bond markets, and the company described ambitions for additional asset classes. Zoega tied the rebrand to the scope of what the business wanted to build. A name change is a small piece of software development. Explaining why a customer should care about it is a larger piece of the chief executive’s job.
The cloud chapter before the handover
Zoega’s record also runs through cVation, the Danish cloud software business founded in 2014. He was a co-founder, and its first annual report listed him in executive management. Christian Møller and Nicolai Graff Andersen also appeared in that early leadership record. All three names would become associated with IMTC. The connections cross businesses as well as the Atlantic.
cVation’s work included building enterprise applications on Microsoft Azure and helping customers move to cloud infrastructure. In November 2021, Skaylink announced its acquisition of the company, adding a Copenhagen operation and more than 70 employees to its network. It was an enterprise software business with customers including SITA, SimCorp, Jabra and Maersk. Financial technology was one part of Zoega’s experience with software used inside other organizations.
Earlier that year, IMTC had introduced an updated investment management system. Zoega described the pressure on managers to offer more customized services at lower cost. The platform joined portfolio and order management workflows, and the launch announcement said more than a third of the existing client base had already moved across. Software launches make promises; customer migration adds the rather practical question of whether people will actually use the new thing.
A torch is useful only if someone takes it
The May 2022 funding round gave IMTC resources to expand engineering and client teams. Feldman became CEO in the same announcement. Zoega’s move to president preserved a role for the founding partner while placing day-to-day leadership elsewhere. The plan attached capital and responsibility to the company’s next stage.
- 2019Build the systemBond-specific optimization launches while Zoega is CEO.
- 2022Pass the keysFeldman becomes CEO; Zoega moves to president.
- 2024Begin togetherErik and Christian establish Pasaana.
Zoega subsequently nominated Feldman for the Bond Buyer’s 2022 Rising Stars recognition. His assessment emphasized strategic vision, execution and authenticity in coaching a team. That combination says something concrete about the succession: the case for Feldman included how he worked with other people, alongside his business responsibilities.
Feldman had joined IMTC in 2017 and worked on business development before becoming chief operating officer. The succession therefore involved an executive who had helped shape the business from within. Zoega’s explanation connected the new appointment to that shared history. The company was adding outside investment while putting a familiar colleague in charge of its next set of decisions.
The company continued raising money after the handover. In December 2025, IMTC announced a $12 million Series A led by Nyca, with client Lord Abbett joining as a strategic investor. That is a later company milestone, under Feldman’s leadership. In a founder’s biography, the distinction matters. A business can carry the imprint of its early builders while its subsequent achievements belong to a continuing team.
A founder can prepare the next person to lead, then find another reason to begin.
The next CEO calls him Dad
Pasaana dates its beginning to 2024 and describes Erik’s return from semi-retirement. Its focus is mortgage operations: underwriting, loan validation, servicing and the documents that connect them. Christian leads product, engineering and technical direction. Erik handles the commercial side. The titles make an unusually legible family tree.
The enterprise also brings Zoega back to familiar territory: financial work organized around information that must be checked, interpreted and passed on. The instrument has changed from a bond to a mortgage. The operational question remains recognizable. How does a decision survive its journey through a business?
Christian has described the problem in public with examples that resist a tidy demonstration: a bank statement arriving as a crooked phone photograph, lender guidelines spread across disagreeing PDFs, pay stubs with inconsistent labels. His account puts much of the engineering around extraction, uncertainty and escalation to a person. These are the materials of the father-son venture. A mortgage file is an excellent way to spoil an elegant demo.
Trust, one permission at a time
Erik’s public writing on AI is concerned with the organization around the model. In one discussion of mortgage workflows, he describes a system flagging an issue, a person entering it again elsewhere and a downstream system never receiving the original signal. Improving an individual step achieves little if the process loses the result. The handoff needs engineering attention, too.
An editorial diagram of the workflow principles the Zoegas discuss. It shows a process, not measured performance.
In another post, he argues for granting AI limited, observable responsibilities and expanding them as reliability is demonstrated. Flagging a missing document is a different permission from underwriting a whole loan. Lenders have their own requirements and risk tolerances. The ability to inspect a result, narrow a task or withdraw permission belongs inside the design.
His discussion of jobs is similarly tied to the work itself. He distinguishes professional judgment from the time spent reading and re-entering information. Cheaper checking, in his argument, could allow more checking. That remains an argument about what automation might make possible. It gives a specific account of the opportunity he is pursuing, without requiring every claim about AI to become a prediction about everybody’s future.
Five partners, two founders, another beginning
Pasaana’s charter program makes the next chapter concrete. It sets out a cohort of five mortgage operators, founder access, feedback sessions and pilots using real production workloads. Erik commits to kickoff calls. Christian takes responsibility for the initial implementations. The program’s detailed schedule places pilot kickoff in October 2026, with first production runs planned for December and January.
The partners are asked to nominate somebody inside their own organization who can own the rollout and remove obstacles. There are regular feedback conversations with the founders, and participants can influence the product roadmap. For a company offering automation, the arrangement assigns quite a few responsibilities to people. Each side has work to do before the software can become part of an ordinary day.
Those commitments bring the story back to responsibility. At IMTC, Zoega prepared to give someone else the chief executive’s job. At Pasaana, he and his son have named the work each will do. The next test is in the calls, the integrations and the loan files. After years of building software for financial professionals, he has another set of keys to hand to a customer.