Last week Euroclear announced the appointment of Usman Ahmad as its Head of Digital Assets, a newly created role. Until late February Ahmad was the co-founding CEO of Zodia Markets, the Standard Chartered crypto trading and stablecoin subsidiary.
Before Zodia he was CIO of Hong Kong’s BC Technology Group where he played a key role in growing OSL, one of the first SFC-licensed digital asset trading platforms. And before entering the crypto world, he spent more than 17 years in capital markets technology leadership at HSBC (ten years) and Merrill Lynch (seven), working across asset classes and geographies. At HSBC he was latterly head of IT for Fixed Income Derivatives.
To date Euroclear’s digital asset activities (explored below) have been spread across various divisions. Creating a dedicated role to pull these together under a single commercially minded owner makes sense. But the selection of Ahmad is notable. He didn’t just work in crypto, he built crypto businesses from scratch, and his background leans more toward market disruption than institutional continuity. So the question is what his resumé tells us about where Euroclear’s digital asset strategy is heading.
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