The story behind Caitlin Long: Who is the Avanti Financial Group founder and what is her net worth?

CAILTIN LONG may not be a household name, but she ought to be. Long founded and leads the Avanti Financial Group, which specialises in economic planning and asset management.

She also recently served as chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and as the US Treasury’s first director of public liaison during the financial crisis of 2007–2008.

But what is the story behind Long’s success, and what is her net worth?

Who is Caitlin Long?

Caitlin Long was raised in Laramie City, Wyoming, US. Her mother was an elementary school teacher in Laramie, and her father was a professor who spent 40 years at the University of Wyoming lecturing on electrical engineering.

Following in her father’s footsteps, Long first studied political economy as an undergraduate at the same university her father taught at between 1987 and 1990 before going on to graduate from Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government in 1994.

After completing her education, she went on to become an investment banker, beginning her career at Salomon Brothers from 1994-1997, before holding key positions at Credit Suisse where she worked from 1997 to 2007. In her Credit Suisse work tenure, she participated in the planning of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) for Prudential, Manulife and John Hancock.

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Just months before the 2008 banking crisis, Long took up a job at Morgan Stanley. She provided advice at the firm on the resolution of almost $40billion in pension obligations for clients including Motorola, Verizon, JC, and Bristol-Myers.

It was while at Morgan Stanley that Caitlin Long’s journey to becoming an entrepreneur began. She learned about Bitcoin for the first time in 2012 and when an article on how to purchase and keep the token arrived in her inbox in 2013, she was completely immersed in it.

In 2014 the Mt Gox crypto exchange, which once accounted for over 70 per cent of all Bitcoin transactions, was hacked and thousands of tokens were stolen. Long was personally impacted by the hack, with the incident convincing her of the necessity for a business that can operate in both the crypto and conventional banking sectors.

Long left Morgan Stanley in 2016 to become the chairwoman and president of the blockchain firm Symbiont which describes itself as “the market-leading smart contracts platform for financial sector uses of blockchain technology”. She has spoken of her love for “honest ledgers” and wants to make securities markets more equitable by issuing and trading securities on a blockchain.

How old is Cailtin Long?

Caitlin Long was born in 1969. She is currently 53-years old.

What is the Avanti Group?

Avanti Financial Group, founded by Long in 2020, is the proprietor of a crypto-asset banking business that specialises in offering regulated services for digital assets. Customers can access banking services for the digital assets industry through the company’s bank, which serves as a compliant link to the US dollar payments system and a custodian of digital assets that can meet rigorous institutional custody standards.

Avanti Financial Group gradually started to expand as a crypto-financial consultancy firm. Avanti raised a $37million Series A in March 2021, which Long claimed she will use to satisfy capital needs and expand her technical staff.

Since its founding, the company has paved the road to become one of Wyoming’s top financial players by fusing digital assets with conventional finance.

In addition to issuing tokenised US dollars and providing asset management services for Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, Avanti’s ambitious ambitions also call for supplying API-based US dollar payment services for wire transfers, automated clearinghouses, and SWIFT.

Long returned to Wyoming after nearly 25 years of living on the East Coast of the United States. In July 2021, Wyoming became the first US state to formally recognize a decentralized autonomous organisation as a result of her ongoing efforts inside the country’s regulatory framework for digital assets.

Wyoming was also the first state in America to approve a new custodial institution for crypto assets that offers storage, security, and banking services to blockchain companies.