As per a recent announcement made by cryptocurrency exchange Binance, the firm has managed to recruit a senior executive from Ripple to lead its American business operations. Catherine Coley, who was serving as head of Ripple’s institutional liquidity will be joining the crypto exchange’s newly opened US arm as its CEO. Considered as world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of volume activity, Binance has been steadily growing its business in global market despite cryptocurrency market facing a big hiccup during post 2017 cryptocurrency market crash. The newly opened US arm of Binance aims at specifically targeting and attracting American traders and Catherine will be responsible for overseeing the firm’s platform technology development and managing business operations in U.S.A. Catherine is a finance industry veteran with vast experience and knowledge in various verticals across the industry having served under multiple tier-1 firms covering an extensive range of finance assets from forex to hedge funds and cryptocurrencies.
Prior to joining Binance US, she served at San Francisco based crypto start up and parent firm of Ripple cryptocurrency is various roles handling various business operations such as custody agents, exchanges, market markers, fund managers, Institutional investors and OTC desks over the course of her two year long tenure at the firm. Prior to Ripple, Catherine served as Forex advisor at Silicon Valley Bank and served at Morgan Stanley for a period of nearly 5 years in their Forex division at Hong Kong and London. While serving in Morgan Stanley, Coley helped create, nurture and expand client relationships on global scale as one of key client contacts at the firm for Asian based currency analysis and market behaviour. Further, she built a client pipeline for the firm made up of Asia focused FX business among European hedge fund clients and asset managers as per details provided in her LinkedIn profile. The Malta based crypto exchange giant is currently gearing up for the formal launch of its US business division which is basically a new joint venture.
In order to ensure successful business operations at US, Changpeng Zhao– CEO of Binance announced earlier that it was closing off all current business operations at US and pulling off access to main Binance website in USA. Instead, Binance wants its US clients to migrate to this newly started business venture which will be operating as a separate business unit based out of US. To make this plan into reality and to hasten the process, Binance has partners with BAM trading services a US based fintech firm which is registered with US FinCEN to roll out the new venture dubbed – “Binance US” exclusively made for customers based in U.S.A. In order to gain high level of market share and see steady business growth the parent firm is said to be licensing its matching engine and wallet technologies in U.S.A. via partnership with many US based firms as partners who are expected to handle local regulatory compliance operations and activities. Gin Chao, strategy officer at Binance stated that the move to open a US based separate business unit was implemented to minimize risk of regulatory bodies overstepping their bounds given stringent measures that many such regulatory bodies are implementing these days. While official date for launch of this new firm has not yet been revealed, Gin commented that the US arm will launch and begin operations before the end of 2019.
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