BNY Mellon Boss Moves To Coinbase

Jeff Horowitz will be the new Chief Compliance Officer of Coinbase. He is the former managing director and Chief Compliance Officer of BNY Mellon and now he spends his time in meetings going through the process of mixing the interests of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

The executive is setting his sights into the future. Horowitz has spend most of his career managing brokerage custody and now he is leading Coinbase’s latest push into crypto solutions for companies.

Coinbase is the 12th largest crypto exchange in the world and it has a daily volume of $156 million USD mostly by Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin transactions. The company has recently opened Coinbase Custody, a new product which aims to make the company more interesting to hedge funds looking to use cryptos to diversify their portfolios.

Just last month, Coinbase bought a licensed broker-dealer, which shows just how serious the company is to enter the institutional space with crypto in spite of the regulatory issues that are happening at the moment.

Horowitz told the media that he built global AML and fraud-prevention programs for companies like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Salomon Brothers for the past two decades and that these programs are what the institutional investors need to see what a big opportunity this market can be for them.

What makes Horowitz so attractive right now is that he has working experience with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and that he served two terms as a member of the FinCEN’s Bank Secrecy Act Advisory Group, which gives him a lot of regulatory experience.

As a result of this new hire, the current Chief Legal and Risk Officer of Coinbase, Mike Lempres, is expected to focus more on the relations of the exchange with the government and less in regulatory practices.

This hire comes at a time in which cryptos faces a scarcity of custody platforms as the institutional demand for cryptos is currently on the rise.

Many other companies are following the same road of Coinbase and looking for custodial services. One of them is based in New York City and it is called ItBit. Another one is Prime Trust, which is based in Nevada. Both of them exist already for some time and were recently qualified to work with this type of services.

Horowitz top priorities are to add new supervisory control to the crypto space and to make sure that the broker-dealer services of Coinbase are in compliance with the current regulations in the United States.

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