Bio
Asheesh Advani is President of Virgin Money US, a financial services pioneer in the emerging social finance space. The company manages loans between relatives and friends (business loans, personal loans, mortgages, and student loans) and in 2008 acquired Lendia to become both a lender and processor of traditional mortgages.
Asheesh and his company wrote a widely-read Small Business Financing Guide for startups. In addition to helping his entrepreneur customers access capital from their network of friends and family, Asheesh has a personal story to tell about the founding and growth of Virgin Money.
Asheesh founded CircleLending in 2002. After investments from friends, family, angel investors, then one round of venture capital, in 2007 the company received a majority stake investment from Richard Branson and the Virgin Group. The company was re-branded and re-launched as a Virgin company, and is now widely regarded as one of the most innovative in the U.S. financial services industry.
Virgin Money's loan volume has grown steadily since the company was founded and recently surpassed $350M. Asheesh and his company have been commended in the national media, including feature articles in the New York Times, Time magazine, Inc. magazine and The Wall Street Journal.
Prior to founding CircleLending, Asheesh worked in the private sector development department at the World Bank Washington, DC. He wrote a World Bank study on small-business growth, entitled Industrial Clusters, which was subsequently used to design consulting projects targeted at micro-enterprises and startups.
Asheesh began his career as a management consultant at the Monitor Group, a business advisory firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Monitor, he worked with Fortune 500 clients and rapidly growing small companies to develop and implement strategies for business growth.
Asheesh holds a B.Sc. in Finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, an M.Sc. in Development Economics from Oxford University, and earned his PhD in Management from Oxford, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar. He lives in a Boston suburb and is an active member of Young Presidents Organization (YPO).
All-new 2010 Ford Transit Connect