Blythe Masters

CEO of Digital Asset Holdings, LLC

New York City, New York

LinkedIn Profile

You achieved a massive amount of success at a relatively young age while at JPMorgan Chase. What key lessons did you take away from this experience?

I was lucky to work at an organization that actively invested in its future leaders and to have bosses and mentors who were willing to take risks in giving me opportunities at an early stage in my career. Finding the right sponsors was critical to my success. I would emphasize that I also enjoyed a fair amount of luck.

What advice do you provide those just entering the financial services industry? What key characteristics should they focus on to further their careers?

Sweat the details, work hard, speak up, take risks and understand the social and economic purpose of what you are doing. Build strong relationships. Focus on doing first class business in a first class way.

Do you consider gender bias in labeling some successful women in any industry as “aggressive” while many of their male counterparts are labeled as “go-getters”?

Gender bias is alive and well. You don’t have to look far online or in the media to see it. For most successful women, overcoming the consequences of this becomes an explicit challenge at some point or other in their careers. This is when the power of a network, and of enlightened male colleagues who work hard to overcome unconscious bias in their organizations is most powerful.

You’ve become the de facto face of the blockchain movement for the banking industry. You were recently quoted in Bloomberg stating: “You should be taking this technology as seriously as you should have been taking the development of the Internet in the early 1990s.” Can you elaborate on why you believe blockchain technology will be so disruptive to the financial services space?

Today, virtually every large financial institution is exploring blockchain technology. But “disruptive” is the wrong word. What was hailed as a great disruptive force for incumbents is proving to be an even greater enabler for them.

Distributed ledgers are nothing more than a clever new form of database technology. They are born of advances in the internet, open­ source protocols, computing power and cryptography. They are shared, replicated, decentralised transactional databases.

These ledgers are continuously replicated and synchronized. Resilience is enhanced by elimination of central points of failure: if one location suffers
an attack or breakdown, others are able to maintain the integrity of the ledger. Security and privacy are achieved by sophisticated credential­ checking techniques, and data are protected through encryption.

The simple consequence is that distributed ledgers create the opportunity
for independent entities to rely on the same, shared, secure source of information. Entities with a need to know about a financial transaction include not just the buyer and seller and their brokers, but custodians, registrars, settlement and clearing agencies, central depositories and, importantly, regulators. Costs are cut dramatically, because instead of every interested party keeping their own record, one prime record can do the job. This reduces duplicative record­keeping, eliminates the need for reconciliation, minimizes error rates and facilitates faster settlement. In turn, faster settlement means less risk in the financial system and lower capital requirements.

Do you believe the banking industry, much of which is based on decades old legacy infrastructure, can pivot and integrate with real-time technologies required in the digital age?

In short yes.

Legacy financial infrastructure is based on centralised, unencrypted hub ­and­ spoke database architecture. It is expensive, inefficient and vulnerable to both operational failure and cyber­attack. Differences within and across separate databases create inconsistent transaction data that require costly reconciliation. All this creates opacity and delay, and makes it harder for regulators to keep abreast of what’s going on.

The technology is evolving fast. The original Bitcoin blockchain has certain features that are problematic for regulated financial institutions. But alternatives known as private or permissioned blockchains—have been developed. These improve upon privacy, transparency and throughput capacity by limiting participation to known and approved parties.

The reason that this technology will catch on, despite financial infrastructure not having been modernized in decades is because banks’ return on equity are unsustainably below their cost of capital, reflecting a challenging revenue environment, rising costs and increased capital requirements. As a result it has become imperative for banks to find ways to restructure their cost base radically, and to reduce their need for capital, while simultaneously responding to the new regulatory requirements for greater transparency.

This is why distributed ledger technology is attracting so much attention and why it will begin to be deployed.

You’ve been active as an equestrian throughout your life. What aspects of this competition have you applied to your corporate career?

Practicing a competitive sport requires dedication, discipline and overcoming obstacles. Riding has taught me many skills that I have deployed at work, but it has also brought much needed balance, release from stress and time with family.

You are a board member of the Global Fund for Women. What attracted you to this organization?

The Global Fund for Women is a grant-making organization dedicated to advancing the human rights of women and girls in over 170 countries around the world. We combat violence, and promote economic and political empowerment and sexual and reproductive health and rights.

I joined the Global Fund Board because I feel passionately about this cause. There is ample evidence that advancement of women’s human rights promotes education, prosperity, growth and peace. Unfortunately the converse is also true – women’s rights suffer in times of war, famine, economic slow-down, violence and political unrest. The Global Fund is doing incredible work at a time when this is sorely needed.

Who do you consider to be strong women leaders in the FinTech space?

There are many, worthy of note, but I would like to highlight Maria Gotsch - President and CEO of the Partnership Fund for New York City. She has been the driving force behind New York’s FinTech Innovation Lab, an incubator which has helped accelerate many new companies. Two of the seven finalists in 2015 were run by female CEOs.

How many dogs to you own? ***Full transparency - we are dog lovers here.***

Four dogs:

• Merlin – Black Lab
• Hazard – Boxer
• Scout – Boxer mix
• Frosty – Jack Russell