Meet Ardian Balaj: SwissBorg’s Legal Crypto Analyst

Born in Kosovo, Ardian Balaj came to Switzerland with his family when he was just five years old. It was 1992, a time of turmoil, several years before the full-blown conflict broke out in Kosovo. His family settled in the village of Lens where he grew up as a minority with Swiss education but, also, the traditional Muslim values of his parents. This multicultural background and the warm welcome he received from the local population helped him build a fantastic capacity to blend in and adapt rapidly to all kinds of situations. A life-skill that has come to good use during his studies and his professional life.

After finishing his high school, Ardian was happy to move from small-town life to Geneva to attend University. At the University of Geneva, he studied linguistics at the faculty of Literature to fulfil a dream of becoming a writer. When studying linguistics, he realised that he had not just a good pen, but, also, a more scientific mind that had been dormant all these years. Ambition and the feeling that he could do anything he wanted with his life drove him to change his field of study. The international ambience of Geneva and the human rights atrocities in his native Kosovo led him to study international law. He studied three years of painful study of Swiss law; he specialised in International and European Law.

Just before graduation, Ardian decided that it was time for him to step out of his comfort zone and gain international experience. He took the opportunity to go to Glasgow, Scotland, with the Erasmus exchange program. Ardian, ever outgoing and curious, took this opportunity to not only practice his English but to travel and meet people from the four corners of the world, creating a vast international network. When asked if he perfected his flawless English in Scotland, he answers with a big smile that extends to, and lights up, his eyes, “Officially yes, but actually, I learned English watching a lot of Netflix series.”

After Glasgow and graduation, the new Swiss lawyer needed to perfect his German. Instead of getting back to Geneva, Ardian moved to Bern, looking for an internship. He found a position working as an intern for the international cooperation Unit with the Swiss financial regulator, FINMA. At the end of his internship, he continued working with this Unit with various financial supervisors for international cooperation. In this capacity, Ardian designed a process to provide and manage on-site inspection visits to foreign authorities of financial institutions and banks. At FINMA he learned to deal with French and American authorities, among others, learning valuable lessons about the differences in approaches and sensibilities.

After putting in place a general plan for on-site visits and watching it function well, Ardian felt that his mission with FINMA was coming to an end, he felt “stuck in a special place, where you feel the weight of the authority behind you. It felt difficult and easy at the same time. Challenging, yet too comfortable to really grow.”

A position with a private bank in Geneva as legal counsel was a valuable experience because he learned, from a bank’s perspective, to identify the impact of new regulations on each department of the company. But, Ardian felt his work stopped where it should begin, He, also, really disliked the ambience of traditional banking where everyone was “bathing in a pool of stress nine hours a day.”

When he was being recruited by SwissBorg, Ardian had many opportunities to work with the best private banking institutions in Geneva. But he felt that the job at SwissBorg was more exciting and pioneering. He believed in the idea that the financial world was in dire need of disruption. The young lawyer sought something more than money or position, “for me, to feel truly successful I need to be fully engaged in my work. I like this sense of owning my work, having direct responsibility to the entity for whom I work. Here, during working hours, I feel like I am SwissBorg. But since we are a family, I am also a We, and #WeAreSwissBorg.”