Industry veteran and former Morgan Stanley managing director Caitlin Long has joined blockchain startup Symbiont as president and chairman of its board of directors.

Long will bring her extensive experience of 22 years in the insurance industry and deep knowledge to the startup. Her informal collaboration with various blockchain startups began 2½ years ago at Morgan Stanley, where she served on its distributed ledger technology working group.

Explaining her reasons for joining Symbiont, Long wrote:

“I chose to join Symbiont because we have the best technology platform for financial sector uses, and we have a great strategy…It does many things competing platforms cannot do. Ours is the only smart contracts platform that was purpose-built for institutional financial markets. We’re ahead of our peers in the race to build production-ready software, because it’s already going into production.”

Long described various features of the platform which places it way ahead of its peers. She said that Symbiont’s architecture is designed specifically for financial services uses and can support substantially more functionality, relative to competing distributed ledger solutions.

“Symbiont’s ledger is currently processing 80,000 transactions per second in a single region, and tens of thousands per second globally. Plus, transaction latency is on the order of milliseconds. So Symbiont’s software is not just outperforming all competitors whose comparable statistics we know—it’s outperforming them by multiple orders of magnitude”, she said, adding that Symbiont has kept a relatively low profile, and intends to continue to do so.

Long is a self-confessed Ethereum fan and is involved with the SingularDTV project. However, in the institutional financial services arena specifically, she believes that Symbiont’s platform has the extra edge saying:

“I believe Symbiont’s platform will win. Symbiont’s smart contracts can do things that are mission-critical for financial institutions and that Ethereum-based smart contracts cannot do, mostly due to Ethereum’s language and protocol limitations.”

While concluding the blog post, Long said that she has personally made a substantial investment in Symbiont’s Series A round. The amount invested has not been disclosed. Founded in 2014, the startup has so far raised over $1.25 million in funding.