Bio
Asheesh Advani is president of CircleLending, a loan administration company that facilitates personal loans, small-business loans, and mortgages among friends, relatives, and business associates. He and his company have written a widely-read Small Business Financing Guidefor startups and have helped small businesses in more than 30 states to launch and finance their growth with funding from relatives and friends.
Asheesh founded CircleLending in May 2000. The company is now widely regarded as one of the most innovative in the financial services industry. It is the first company to service the nation's $65 billion volume of interpersonal loans between relatives and friends. CircleLending provides individual lenders and borrowers with documentation, payment processing and administrative services to reduce the financial, emotional and legal risks associated with private loans. The median interest rate on these unsecured loans is approximately 6 percent, effectively providing individuals with an affordable cost of capital with customized repayment schedules that meet their unique financial circumstances. CircleLending's loan volume has been growing at a rate of more than 25 percent per quarter since product launch. Asheesh and his company have been commended in the national media, including feature articlesin Time magazine, Inc. magazine and The Wall Street Journal.
Prior to founding CircleLending, Asheesh worked in the private sector development department at the World Bankin 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 Monitor Company, 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 Jamaica Plain, Masssachusetts, and is active in the entrepreneurship community, including serving on the boards of the Aspen Institute's MicroMentorprogram and the Pioneer Institute's Center for Urban Entrepreneurship.