Bio
Asheesh Advani has more than 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur and investor. He is an investor in financial services companies and an advisor to Core Venture Capital, a new fund associated with the Center for Financial Services Innovation. Asheesh was the founder and CEO of CircleLending, which pioneered the business of managing peer-to-peer loans between relatives and friends and was acquired by the Virgin Group in 2007. Subsequently, he founded and served as CEO of Virgin Money USA, the American arm of Richard Branson’s consumer financial services business, until June 2009. Asheesh previously worked with the World Bank and the Monitor Group, where he was a strategy consultant and Entrepreneur-in-Residence. He was the founding board chair of Credit Builders Alliance, a nonprofit organization that succeeded in enabling major credit bureaus to accept data from small micro-lenders. Asheesh has received Innovation Awards from the Association of Enterprise Opportunity and from the Center for Financial Services Innovation. He has authored two books on the topic of informal business financing by Nolo Press that have received favorable reviews in the Wall Street Journal and Business Week.
Asheesh is a graduate of the Wharton School and Oxford University, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar. Selected as one of Boston’s Top 40 Under 40 by the Boston Business Journal, he has also been profiled widely in the media, including The New York Times, PBS, and NPR. Asheesh actively supports social enterprises and nonprofits in the areas of financial security and education as a director, advocate, and advisor.