Van started his finance career at Deutsche Bank's Derivative Modeling Validation Group in London before moving into investment banking at Merrill Lynch's Investment Banking Group in Los Angeles where he worked as a generalist covering the retail, technology, and consumer industries. Eventually, he moved to New York within Merrill to join their Financial Institutions Investment Banking Group where he completed over a dozen equity, debt, merger and acquisitions, and leveraged buyout transactions for banks, exchanges, broker-dealers, insurance brokers, and asset managers. Van has done training sessions in the United States, Asia, and the Middle East. He graduated with honors and magna cum laude in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics with a dual degree in Economics from Claremont McKenna College.