Binance relocates ex-Standard Chartered MD from Singapore to Spain
While the upcoming US election may spark quick growth within the crypto sector, executives say regulatory changes have been gradually maturing it. Binance, an industry giant, has been hiring a number of investment bank alums within its regulatory team, and one of the most recent hires is changing more than just companies.
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Ben Bowden joined Binance last week as its head of legal for Europe, based in Barcelona. He's spent the last 24 years, however, working out of Singapore; he was most recently deputy general counsel for OK Group, the company behind crypto exchange OKX. Bowden had been at the company for a year and a half, and spent two years before that at payments fintechs Currencycloud and Assembly Payments.
The bulk of Bowden's career was spent in banking with Standard Chartered. He joined "to build a transactional legal team supporting the DCM business" and was made MD only two years later. He held a number of roles in the years since, but his last at the bank was chief compliance officer for its venture capital arm, SC Ventures.
Bowden isn't the only banking alum to join Binance's legal team in the past week. Jake McQuitty joined this month as an EU regulatory lead; he previously spent four and a half years as head of investigations and enforcement for Europe and the Middle East at Barclays, though was more recently a partner at Bristol-based law firm TLT.
The crypto industry is far from disaster-proof nowadays; its market cap fell by $500bn+ over the weekend, and Bitcoin prices fell almost 20%. However, this has coincided with catastrophic performances across global stock markets, so a silver lining may be that this is evidence that crypto is now strongly tied to traditional financial markets... for better and for worse.
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