Cristal Baron
President
cristal.baron@ricefin.com

As President, Cristal Baron supervises administrative and operational activities throughout the firm and works in a leadership capacity to support the firm’s investment banking and other activities.  She is also responsible for the overall financial management and integrity of Rice Financial.

Before joining Rice Financial, Ms. Baron was a Vice President at the JPMorgan Private Bank, where she assisted high-net-worth individuals and their families with investment management (including publicly traded securities, hedge funds and private equity investments) and management of concentrated stock positions through the use of derivative products and other strategies.

Prior to JPMorgan, Ms. Baron worked for seven years as a municipal derivatives professional at Merrill Lynch, ultimately serving as a Director in the Municipal Markets Division.  Her responsibilities in this role included marketing, structuring and executing various types of derivative structures, and designing, establishing and maintaining swap programs to assist clients in actively managing liability portfolios. She served as the primary structuring and execution professional on more than 50 derivative product transactions totaling $2 billion and managed the legal, quantitative and administrative details of more than 70 derivative product transactions totaling $1.4 billion.

During her municipal derivatives career, Ms. Baron has worked on transactions employing tax-exempt, taxable and hybrid interest rate swap and option products; tax-exempt and taxable fixed, floating and inverse floating rate debt instruments; interest rate hedges versus a specified bond index or an anticipated debt issuance by a specified credit; inflation-indexed swap and bond products; and equity swaps.

Prior to her career on Wall Street, Ms. Baron worked as a journalist for Dow Jones News Services.  She received a bachelor’s degree cum laude in journalism from Howard University and an MBA from McGill University in Montreal.

FINRA Licenses:  7, 24, 63

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