Five of the biggest crypto-friendly banks and their hiring plans
Crypto enthusiasts have managed to make it a good few months into 2023 without any major slip ups. Coinbase earned above projected results for Q4 while banks are ramping up crypto hiring, but the recent ordeal with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is 2023's first major hurdle for digital assets.
Crypto specialist bank Silvergate also went under last week and unlike SVB, does not look like being bailed out. Neither does Signature Bank, another massive collapse that formerly had a number of crypto focused clients.
Who out there is left to support the crypto infrastructure? There are six major banks still on firm ground (or so it seems)
Cross River Bank
New Jersey based Cross River Bank is a fintech specialist. They provide infrastructure to embedded payments, cards and lending fintechs as well as crypto firms.
The bank achieved a $3bn valuation at the height of technology funding, after acquiring the industries heavy hitters like Stripe and Coinbase as clients.
Cross River Bank has 61 open positions across the US and Israel. The US team has 7 open positions in their IT department while Israel's hiring is heavily tech focused.
Series Financial
Series Financial provides centralization and automation of financial products. They partnered with regulated digital asset platform Anchorage Digital to provide their crypto services.
Series' hiring is predominantly focused on tech. Multiple hires have come from Meta affiliated continuous integration providers CircleCI, including VP of engineering June Jung last August and Rithu Chandra this March.
Engineers have also joined them direct from tech firms like Apple's former engineering product manager who joined as a product and partnerships lead last April.
Series' hiring at present is very limited. Two roles are available: an engineering manager in North America and a senior backend engineer in Canada.
Customers Bank
Commercial and consumer focused bank Customers Bank provides a number of digital asset focused services through infrastructure provided by New York fintech Tassat.
Their digital assets division is predominantly comprised of alumni of the now defunct Silvergate Bank. These include Managing Director Robb Layfield and SVP Claudia Pinilla. Other notable staff include VP Patrick Madden, who joined from prop trading firm Flow Traders in New York.
Customers Bank has 17 open positions at the moment. While none are in an engineering capacity, there are a few data focused roles including a chief data officer and a senior data analyst. They are also opening up to interns in 2024 with applications starting in fall.
BCB Group
Across the pond is London based accounts and trading firm for digital assets, BCB group. Among their top clients are unicorns like Gemini, Kraken and Crypto.com.
They have easily one of the most impressive repertoires of TradFi talent. Ex-JPMorgan MD and Head of EMEA G10 FX spot trading is their head of OTC trading. Also, CTO Farzad Pezeshkpour was a distinguished engineer for emerging technologies at Natwest and Nigel Holt was a lead software engineer at Goldman Sachs.
2023 hiring has been sparse, with the focus predominantly on internal promotions. In december however, a number of more junior engineers were brought in, including Lauren Brabbin and Kate Usacova. That recruitment drive appears to have been very female focused.
BCB's 2023 hiring is very limited. They have just 3 open positions with an emphasis on sales.
Jewel Bank
Jewel Bank is more diminutive in size, but doing some interesting things. The Bermuda based fintech announced plans to launch a USD backed stablecoin alongside blockchain infrastructure providers Polygon.
Jewel Bank's hiring as of late has a particular focus on HSBC alumni. Late last year they acquired their head of management information utility Paul Summerville as a senior business and data management analyst and head of distribution for wealth and personal banking Katie Brown as their head of operations.
Hires in 2023, while sparse, have that same focus. This month it brought in Talia Simons as head of client services, she previously spent over 5 years at the bank.
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