Company
A company building a bank.
Longstone Financial, Inc. is a Texas corporation based in Houston. It is building a bank for affluent individuals, private clients, and operating businesses, and it is seeking to acquire a full-service, OCC-chartered, FDIC-insured bank. Longstone Financial, Inc. is not a bank today.
Leadership
Twelve senior officers lead Longstone. Four of them will be named in due course.
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Gene A. Grant II
Chief Executive Officer & Chairman, Founder
Mr. Grant brings more than 36 years of experience in global banking and financial technology. Before founding Longstone, he was a Managing Director at BBVA and its U.S. subsidiary BBVA Compass, held senior roles at Standard Chartered Bank and Deutsche Bank, and consulted for Citibank, Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, UBS, ANZ, and PIMCO.
He has served as chief executive of an established financial-services software vendor, founding CEO of a global independent price-validation service, and CEO of a public company listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange, and began his career as an open-outcry futures floor trader.
Since 2018 he has led the design, development, and testing of the digital-commodity banking products Longstone will bring to market. Mr. Grant does not personally own crypto-assets of any kind.
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President & Chief Banking Officer
Executive Director
Name to be announced
Longstone’s incoming President is a serving bank president and a career credit officer who has twice served as chief credit officer. At Longstone he will lead day-to-day banking and sit on the board as an executive director.
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Ora Helmholz
Chief Operating Officer
Ms. Helmholz brings more than 30 years of senior leadership experience in banking operations, technology, and product delivery. She most recently served as U.S. Country Chief Operating Officer for First Abu Dhabi Bank PJSC, an international bank whose U.S. branch is regulated by the OCC, where she oversaw operations and information technology, operational resilience, and U.S. regulatory compliance.
Her career spans treasury operations, investment-banking operations, branch operations, and responsibility for systems and process transformation at international banks such as Deutsche Bank AG, Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale, Standard Chartered SG, and National Bank of Abu Dhabi, UAE.
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F. Stephen Helmholz
Chief Customer Officer & Head of Private Client Services, Executive Director
Mr. Helmholz has worked in financial services for more than 40 years, beginning with fifteen years on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as a currency broker and foreign-exchange arbitrageur, then opening and managing twenty-four-hour FX trading desks serving professional and private traders globally.
He subsequently led major technology upgrades for derivatives trading, risk, and operations platforms at Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup London, Standard Chartered, and ANZ, and is a former co-founder and Director of Operations of a company taken public on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange together with Mr. Grant.
He studied business economics at Wheaton College and earned a B.A. from DePaul University.
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Chief Financial Officer
Name to be announced
Longstone’s Chief Financial Officer is a licensed CPA with extensive experience in financial reporting, controllership, internal controls, and regulatory compliance across financial services, in both startup and established companies.
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Katherine Avery
Chief Risk Officer
Ms. Avery is a risk-management executive with more than 20 years of experience across Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 financial institutions, most recently as Global Head of Operational Risk at StoneX Group Inc., with earlier roles as Associate Director at S&P Global, Vice President of Enterprise Risk at Bank of Oklahoma, and Risk Manager at BBVA Compass.
A Certified Fraud Examiner with operational-risk and third-party-risk certifications, she holds a B.B.A. from the University of Mississippi and an M.B.A. from the University of Texas at Tyler.
She owns Longstone’s enterprise-risk program, reporting functionally to the Risk and Compliance Committee of the Board.
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Chief Compliance Officer
Name to be announced
Longstone’s Chief Compliance Officer brings more than 40 years of banking and compliance experience, including service as chief compliance officer in the capital-markets and investment-banking divisions of super-regional, national, and global banks, and has built compliance programs under FRB, OCC, CFTC, NFA, SEC, and FINRA regulation.
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Mario Flores
Deputy BSA Officer
Mr. Flores brings more than 20 years of financial-services experience, including 15+ years in BSA/AML, KYC, and sanctions-screening roles at BBVA USA, Macquarie, JPMorgan Chase, and BNY Mellon, and most recently led the AML/KYC client-onboarding function at Motiva Enterprises.
His digital-asset experience is direct: customer due diligence for virtual-currency customers, OFAC screening of digital-asset transactions, Travel Rule implementation, and integration of blockchain analytics into transaction monitoring.
He will carry day-to-day operational responsibility for the BSA/AML program under the Chief Compliance Officer.
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Michael W. Clayton
Chief Technology Officer & Information Security Officer
Mr. Clayton brings more than 35 years of senior capital-markets technology experience across four continents, including roles at Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan, ING, BBVA, and Standard Bank, and service as CTO for Enterprise Risk Management at AIG, where he rebuilt risk-management technology after the 2008 financial crisis.
He has led global teams through large-scale custom development and vendor-platform integration for trading, risk, and operations systems, and owns Longstone’s platform architecture, information-security program, and operational resilience.
He holds a B.A. from Princeton University.
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Gene Grant III
Head of Products
An early digital-asset analyst and member of the LevelField founding team, Mr. Grant has focused on digital-asset markets, infrastructure, and financial products.
At Longstone, he leads product development and design from concept through implementation, overseeing product architecture, user experience, and interface design across customer-facing products.
He previously served as a business-process expert on the post-merger consolidation of two multinational firms.
He holds a B.A. from the University of Houston.
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Katherine Rupp
Marketing Director
Ms. Rupp brings more than 20 years of marketing leadership, with a concentration in financial and professional services and expertise spanning growth strategy, customer acquisition and retention, public relations, brand development, and marketing automation.
She has built and scaled marketing functions and infrastructure across a range of industries and has been a featured speaker for organizations including MetLife and the U.S. Small Business Administration.
She holds a B.A. in English from Saint Joseph’s University New York.
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Head of Strategy
Name to be announced
Longstone’s incoming Head of Strategy most recently directed digital-asset strategy for a large national company outside financial services, where he brought Bitcoin into the company’s operations.
Board of directors
The board of Longstone Financial, Inc. will comprise nine voting directors, a majority of them independent.
Executive directors
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Gene A. Grant II
Chairman of the Board.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Longstone Financial, Inc.
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President & Chief Banking Officer
Executive Director.
Name to be announced.
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F. Stephen Helmholz
Executive Director.
Chief Customer Officer & Head of Private Client Services of Longstone Financial, Inc.
Independent directors
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Stephen Hollingshead, Ph.D.
Lead Independent Director
Dr. Hollingshead is the founder and chief executive of a RegTech company working to bring property rights and financial inclusion to the unbanked through trust, transparency, and technology.
He served on the board of MERSCorp Holdings through its turnaround and sale to Intercontinental Exchange, advised senior political and business leaders on special economic zones in Iraq and Mexico, and served as Senior Advisor to the Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Enforcement at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from Marquette University and a B.A. from the University of Houston.
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Lauren Sparks
Independent Director. Chair, Risk & Compliance Committee
Ms. Sparks is the founder of Agility Bank, N.A., the Houston-based, digitally forward commercial community bank that opened in May 2022 as the first minority depository institution in the United States primarily owned and led by women; she served as founder, CEO, and president through late 2023 and as a founding director thereafter.
She previously founded Third Party Resources, Inc., a consulting firm that has served dozens of community banks, and brings more than three decades of community-banking, compliance, and risk-management experience in the Houston market.
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Chris McMillan
Independent Director
Mr. McMillan is a Founding Partner of 3V Capital Partners, an investment-banking and advisory firm serving technology-driven businesses, and serves as Chief Strategy Officer at Permuto Capital.
His career spans more than fifteen years in senior investment-banking roles at Credit Suisse, Wells Fargo, Cain Brothers, Truist, and Deutsche Bank, advising on M&A, capital raising, and capital-markets strategy for technology and fintech companies. He holds a B.S. in Management with a focus on finance and accounting from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Three further independent directors will be named.
Company facts
- Legal name
- Longstone Financial, Inc.
- Form
- Texas corporation
- Location
- Houston, Texas
- What it is
- A company building a bank. It is not a bank today and does not offer banking products.
- Status
- The technology platform is built and in testing. Longstone is seeking to acquire a full-service, OCC-chartered, FDIC-insured bank.
- Contact
- info@longstone.us