Baton Systems (“Baton”), the fintech transforming post-trade processing using distributed ledger technology (DLT), has announced the appointment of David Ornstein as the company’s first Chief Operating Officer.
Ornstein joins the rapidly-scaling business at a crucial time, as industry demand continues to soar for innovative solutions that enable banks to optimise funding and capital returns by addressing rising levels of settlement risk, unnecessary costs and inefficiencies in post-trade processing. With a unique mix of both front and back office experience across capital markets, Ornstein has been driving strategic change and operational excellence in both high-growth and established global financial services businesses for over 25 years.
Ornstein was previously Chief Operating Officer of Global Markets at Barclays Investment Bank, where he guided the business through a period of rapid growth and maturity. During his 13 year tenure, he oversaw the transformation of the business’ processes, reducing costs and improving resilience. Prior to joining Barclays, Ornstein held roles with Deutsche Bank, where he was COO of US Credit Markets, as well as at Bankers Trust. Most recently, he has been working in an advisory capacity for several growth companies, providing counsel to CEOs and founders actively scaling their businesses.
As Baton’s COO, Ornstein will be focused on enabling the firm to effectively scale, as the number of clients continues to expand along with market interest in deploying DLT solutions that deliver tangible benefit in the post-trade environment. Baton’s solutions are now being used by several of the world’s largest financial institutions and have facilitated the movement of over $3.5 trillion settlements to date.
Ornstein will be based in New York and will work closely with Baton’s Founder and CEO, Arjun Jayaram.
Arjun Jayaram, Founder and CEO of Baton Systems, said: “I am delighted to welcome David to the company. With vast experience delivering operational solutions for global businesses, he is a practitioner at the top of his game. David joins a team of world-class industry leaders and his extensive operational experience, in both the banking industry and helping fast growth companies achieve scale, will prove instrumental as we execute our 2022 strategy. I look forward to working with David to achieve our global growth ambitions.”
Commenting on his appointment, David Ornstein said: “I’m thrilled to take up the role of COO at Baton. This is a pioneering business on a mission to constructively disrupt the status quo and deliver transformative change across the entire post-trade process. Baton is working with the world’s largest financial services companies to deliver the solutions necessary to move away from the costly server-based, hard-wired and inflexible infrastructures that for too long have hampered their ability to focus resources on building the bank of the future. Throughout my career I’ve seen first-hand how automation and the latest innovations can transform a business’s ability to deliver and I’m excited to now work with a company that has the technology available today to allow firms to achieve exactly that.”
Ornstein’s appointment follows the news in September that the Former Basel Committee Secretary General, William Coen, had joined the firm as a Senior Advisor and the former Global Head of Futures, OTC Clearing, and FX Prime Brokerage at Citi, Jerome Kemp, had taken up the role of President at Baton Systems.
Baton recently announced its transformative blockchain-inspired Core-FX solution is now facilitating the world’s first interbank Payment vs Payment (PvP) settlements outside of CLS. The solution is now actively being used on a daily basis and is readily available to all FX businesses, enabling all currencies to be safely settled on demand, in less than three minutes, with settlement finality.
