Goldman Sachs’ new global head of digital assets, Mathew McDermott, is setting his sights on modernising the bank’s repo and securities finance businesses with distributed ledger technologies (DLT).
McDermott is based in London and was promoted to his new role last month, taking over from Justin Schmidt who held the position since joining Goldman in 2018.
A spokesperson for the bank confirms to SLT that McDermott aims to build out his teams in Europe and Asia as part of plans to standardise Goldamans’ financing processes by overhauling legacy systems.
McDermott has been with the US investment bank since 2005 and has swapped hats several times since then including stints as global head of cross-asset financing, and global co-head of global liquidity products.
McDermott is also a board member of the International Securities Lending Association (ISLA), a member of the Bank of England’s Money Market Committee and the Asset and Liability committee at Goldman Sachs.
ISLA invited McDermott to join its board of directors in 2015 along with its now-chair Jonathan Lombardo, of Eurex Clearing, as part of the association’s drive to better reflect its membership in the makeup of its board.
The appointment of a securities finance veteran to lead one of the world’s most prominent bank’s DLT and cryptocurrency initiatives is expected to further accelerate the digitisation of the market.
Earlier this year the Options Clearing Corporation unveiled plans to become the first clearinghouse to transition its securities lending services to a blockchain platform.
Elsewhere the Israeli Stock Exchange is also due to launch a centralised blockchain solution for the country’s securities lending participants; to say nothing of the plethora of other, already active DLT solutions making headway in the market.
