Strategic hires strengthen legal, regulatory and technology capabilities

London, 19th August 2019. Fnality International (Fnality), delivering the means of payments on-chain for tomorrow’s financial markets, is pleased to announce key additions to the senior management and advisory team. Gary Chu joins as General Counsel and Adam Clarke as Chief Technology Officer (CTO), with Daniel Heller joining as Head of Regulatory Affairs.

Prior to joining Fnality, Gary was Legal Counsel and an Executive Director at UBS and a key participant in the consortium of financial institutions who created the Utility Settlement Coin (USC) Project which led to the establishment of Fnality.

Gary said: “Having been involved with the USC Project since 2015, it was an opportunity I could not pass up on, when offered the chance to move to Fnality full time.” He added: “I am looking forward to dedicating myself to making our USC vision and the Fnality goal of creating a network of decentralised Financial Market Infrastructures (dFMIs) a reality.”

In his role as CTO, Adam brings his unique experience of delivering projects within early-stage firms as well as large banks; ensuring that the Fnality solution architecture, design and service transition plan translates into a manageable, reliable, secure and high- performance solution.

Adam commented: “I am delighted to be joining this team of really talented and passionate technologists using advanced technology plus DevOps and agile techniques to move Fnality from proof of concept to live application. This is a unique opportunity to lay the foundations for tomorrow’s financial market infrastructure.”

Daniel Heller was previously at the IMF, before which he chaired the secretariat of the CPMI in Basel, which sets the standards for market infrastructures. Prior to that Daniel was at the Swiss National Bank.

All three will report to Rhomaios Ram, CEO of Fnality, who said, “I am pleased to welcome Adam, Gary and Daniel to the team. Having such high-quality individuals join us is validation of our plans and commitment to changing our market infrastructure to evolve to meet the challenge of a digital economy.”

He added, “Gary brings with him an in-depth understanding of the USC Project. He has been a key member of the former consortium legal team, in his previous role at UBS, contributing to our engagement with central banks, and helping to navigate the project through the initial creation and subsequent growth of the consortium to the establishment of Fnality.”

Rhom continued “Our aim is to have the first USC live and connected to Use Cases in one currency in the second half of 2020. Adam’s experience in delivering complex projects will be invaluable in ensuring quality delivery; participant integration success and product delivery milestones are met.”

Fnality was set up by a consortium of financial institutions with the collective goal to make settlement as easy as possible by setting the standards for tomorrow’s tokenised financial market infrastructure. The founding shareholders comprise: Banco Santander, BNY Mellon, Barclays, CIBC, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, ING, KBC Group, Lloyds Banking Group, MUFG Bank, Nasdaq, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, State Street Corporation, and UBS.

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About Fnality

Fnality is the commercial realisation of a four-year Research & Development program (the ‘USC project’) that has focused on understanding how market infrastructure needs to evolve to meet the challenge of a digital economy

Fnality has been tasked with creating a regulated settlement network of distributed Financial Market Infrastructures (dFMIs) with an associated digital settlement asset Utility Settlement Coin (USC) for each addressed currency, to settle the tokenised value transactions with legal finality using a peer-to-peer exchange and will provide the means of payment-on-chain for tomorrow’s financial markets.

Fnality has been set up by a consortium of Financial Institutions – Banco Santander, BNY Mellon, Barclays, CIBC, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, ING, KBC Group, Lloyds Banking Group, MUFG Bank, Nasdaq, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, State Street Corporation, and UBS – with the collective goal to make settlement as easy as possible by setting the standards for tomorrow’s tokenised financial market infrastructure.

For more information please visit www.fnality.org or follow us on Twitter @fnality or LinkedIn