With 18 years of experience in traditional finance, including spells at BlackRock, Barclays and Lloyds Banking Group, Edwards is a specialist in the development and structuring of investment products.
With her investment experience, Edwards will be crucial to the development of Avantgarde’s ecosystem of digital asset investment products. This includes Avantgarde’s crypto fund platform, the world’s first fully regulated on-chain funds platform, as well as the firm’s own digital asset investment funds.
In addition she will oversee compliance and licensing to ensure that Avantgarde continues to scale, with the firm’s recent expansion into Abu Dhabi (ADGM) marking a new chapter of growth that builds on its existing operations in London, Bahamas and Panama.
Edwards’ expertise will play a key role in delivering a seamless experience for Avantgarde’s client base of institutional investors, high net-worth individuals, family offices, fund managers and DAOs alike.
Mona El Isa, founder and CEO of Avantgarde Finance, stated:
“The digital asset space strives to make markets more accessible, efficient and inclusive; however, there remains regulatory uncertainty, scalability issues, fragmentation and complexity. Frances’ experience will ensure that Avantgarde can address these issues as we help institutional investors, private investors, fund managers and DAOs access diversified digital asset investment products.
“At the extreme, traditional investment structuring can impede product innovation and investor access. Having worked in such environments, Frances truly understands what we are trying to achieve. Our funds are already 80% more cost efficient and ten times faster to launch than a traditional investment product. By blending Frances’ investment experience and Avantgarde’s speed and innovation, we look forward to evolving our offering.”
Frances Edwards, chief operating officer at Avantgarde Finance added:
“I spent 18 years in traditional finance, and experienced first-hand the laborious and costly processes involved. I then guided a crypto trading business through extreme market volatility, triggered by a series of centralised finance risk events and after those experiences I was keen to move closer to the decentralised finance environment.
“I was aware of Avantgarde’s vision to solve problems facing traditional finance and am excited to be a part of a business delivering on-chain solutions to improve transparency, simplicity and broader access to digital asset management products.”
About Avantgarde
Avantgarde is a digital-first crypto asset management firm.
We help institutional investors, fund managers and DAOs access digital asset investments. Avantgarde offers exposure to a range of unique digital strategies that deliver high-quality benefits whilst adhering to our principles of access, transparency and enablement.
Our crypto funds are built on blockchain technology, which offers substantial cost savings, faster speed to market and increased transparency to investors. This digital-first approach, combined with our uniquely experienced investment team, gives us a competitive edge and sets us up to be your trusted partner in the space.
