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 an experienced investment banker, previously working at Merrill Lynch as a Director in the Municipal Markets Division and as a Vice President at JPMorgan.  Ms. Baron is also responsible for the overall financial management of Rice Financial.  She is credited with having successfully maintained the financial integrity of the firm while transforming its systems and protocols during its substantial expansion into the public finance and taxable fixed income sales businesses, increasing the number of professionals dedicated to sales, trading and underwriting by more than five times and integrating a dozen additional investment bankers within a short period.  In her role, Ms. Baron provides oversight on all of the firm’s transactional activities.

Before joining Rice Financial, 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 in Journalism cum laude from Howard University and an MBA from McGill University in Montreal.

FINRA Licenses:  7, 24, 63