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Nadine Chakar, Chief Digital Officer at DTCC, talks about building blockchain responsibly
Nadine Chakar is often called one of the most powerful women in finance. As the global head of the DTCC’s digital assets wing, which settles an astronomical amount of transactions (in the quadrillions) each year, you have a front-row seat to seeing how technology is reinventing finance before our eyes . This may be why she has become a staunch advocate of blockchain-based innovations.
Nadine Chakar is one speaker at this year’s Consensus festivalin Austin, Texas, May 29-31.
“With tokenization, companies could be more capital efficient, create new business models, and more easily expand product offerings and distribution channels. Businesses could unlock new efficiencies and discover ways to streamline existing processes while finding new markets and ways to unlock liquidity – and they can probably do it cheaper and faster,” Chakar he wrote in a CoinDesk editorial.
Chakar, who has over 30 years of experience in global wealth and wealth management, has essentially charted his own path in the world of finance. Prior to DTCC (which acquired its compliance-focused tokenization company Securrency in 2023), Chakar served as executive vice president at State Street, where he essentially built the State Street Digital unit following a stint as the division’s executive vice president the company’s global markets.
“This blend of experiences between the traditional and startup worlds has helped me, as a leader, better understand how to find the right balance between agile and responsible innovation,” Chakar said in an interview.
CoinDesk caught up with Chakar to discuss his professional history, how he sees digital transformation, and what responsible regulation of cryptocurrencies would look like.
How well has your career at places like State Street Digital and BNY Mellon prepared you to lead the digital assets business at DTCC?
My experience working at highly regulated financial institutions has given me skills in leading teams that can innovate responsibly and transparently while meeting the highest regulatory standards. However, considering my time as CEO of Securrency, I saw the power of a fintech that can innovate quickly. This blend of experiences between the traditional and startup worlds has helped me, as a leader, better understand how to find the right balance between agile and responsible innovation.
Now that security has become DTCC digital assets, I believe we are getting the best of both worlds. We combine DTCC’s legacy of trust and experience as an infrastructure for the world’s largest capital markets with Securrency’s best-in-class technology capabilities.
Are you seeing the impact of digital assets on traditional financial markets?
I believe that digital assets largely operate in a different universe than traditional markets. However, I think we are at an inflection point where the two are starting to converge. A major challenge is that innovation continues to happen in silos, where financial institutions partner with a fintech [company] to launch a pilot project, then culminate in a press release and then fizzle out afterwards.
We call for a change in approach: we should focus on large-scale pilots with many participants and have experiments build on each other incrementally to start building a broader, interoperable digital asset ecosystem that can power digital markets.
It is often said that the market structure of digital assets needs reform – do you have an idea of what this should look like?
We need an ecosystem for digital assets that is worthy of what we have today for traditional assets. First of all, we need infrastructures capable of connecting traditional systems with the digital ecosystem and which guarantee the same level of solidity and security as existing offers. Second, we need to make sure we facilitate how assets and processes can move across multiple blockchains.
Third, we must have a clear legal and regulatory framework to establish controls and standards. This is essential and should include standards for data, including its use and collection, methods for protecting private data, and establishing exactly what data is allowed on the chain.
Of course, DTCC has been bringing this type of expertise to the markets for over 50 years. We have an established ecosystem for traditional securities, which will serve as the foundation for building the digital infrastructure of the future. We are also here to help guide the evolution of the regulatory framework over time to support digital assets.
We can’t do it alone. This is why we have partnered with other financial market infrastructures, Euroclear and Clearstream, to publish a new document outlining the path forward to develop this ecosystem in a measured and collaborative way. We are excited to announce the document at Consensus.
What are you most looking forward to about Consensus?
Networking and connecting with colleagues. It bears repeating: the path to creating the digital asset ecosystem begins with collaboration. While there will always be room for companies to compete with their own brilliant ideas and compelling use cases, we won’t make significant progress on tokenization without working together. I’m excited for the industry to work together to create a robust, interoperable digital asset ecosystem.