Copper Chief Risk Officer Says ‘Cellular Explosion’ Will Accelerate Crypto Usage

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  • First nation to com­mit to a cen­tral bank dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy will start “an avalanche of very sim­i­lar types of evo­lu­tion,” Tim Neill says
  • Non-cryp­to firms such as Mas­ter­card will be unable to piv­ot at a speed that blockchain tech­nol­o­gy demands, accord­ing to the Cop­per executive

The new chief risk offi­cer at Cop­per is look­ing to put his exten­sive tra­di­tion­al finance back­ground to work to help the cryp­to cus­to­di­an mix the best of bank­ing oper­a­tions with a DeFi slant.

Tim Neill comes from Mas­ter­card, where he helped the finan­cial ser­vices giant bol­ster its real-time pay­ments busi­ness. He joined the com­pa­ny through Mastercard’s acqui­si­tion of pay­ment sys­tems builder VocaLink in 2016 for rough­ly $920 million. 

A for­mer exec­u­tive at Deutsche Bank, Stan­dard Char­tered Bank and Lon­don Stock Exchange Group, Neill has focused on pay­ments, open bank­ing, finan­cial ser­vices and tech­nol­o­gy over the course of his career.

Found­ed by Dmit­ry Tokarev in 2018, Cop­per pro­vides cus­tody, prime bro­ker­age and set­tle­ment ser­vices to insti­tu­tion­al investors. 

Neill’s hire fol­lowed the com­pa­ny bring­ing aboard five for­mer Bank of Amer­i­ca Mer­rill Lynch employ­ees to lead the expan­sion of its prime infra­struc­ture offer­ings. Cop­per also hired for­mer Citi exec­u­tive Sab­ri­na Wil­son — to whom Neill will report — as chief oper­at­ing officer.

Neill sat down with Block­works for an inter­view about what he is keep­ing an eye on in his new role and what trends he is see­ing in the broad­er cryp­to space.


Block­works: What were you focused on at Mastercard?

Neill: I was run­ning the [real-time] pay­ments busi­ness, and then we decid­ed to diver­si­fy even fur­ther, and we start­ed get­ting into dig­i­tal assets, CBD­Cs, cross-bor­der payments…The approach to build core real-time pay­ment sys­tems real­ly becomes the foun­da­tion­al rail with which to add on all these services.

One of the things I became quite pas­sion­ate about through that time at Mas­ter­card was look­ing at finan­cial inclusion.

You have to be able to democ­ra­tize the access to finan­cial ser­vices for parts of the world that sim­ply won’t be able to get what we con­sid­er to be mature mar­ket access vehi­cles. What’s hap­pened over the recent years is an explo­sion in cel­lu­lar con­nec­tiv­i­ty across these emerg­ing mar­kets and fron­tier markets.

Block­works: How does this relate to crypto?

Neill: When you start look­ing at democ­ra­tiz­ing finan­cial pay­ment vehi­cles, that inevitably takes you down the path toward look­ing to be able to con­nect those peo­ple through real-time bank­ing pay­ment solu­tions on a cel­lu­lar platform.

One of the things that became huge­ly obvi­ous to me is that dig­i­tal assets, in their var­i­ous forms and func­tions, sud­den­ly get pre­sent­ed to this com­mu­ni­ty that pre­vi­ous­ly has had vir­tu­al­ly zero expo­sure to bank­ing options.

So you can be a sub­sis­tence farmer in the hill­sides of Thai­land and you can be trad­ing on eToro. You can be decid­ing that you actu­al­ly want to drop more mon­ey into [a cryptoasset]…and you’re doing it through your smart­phone and the trade is in real time.

Block­works: Why did you join Cop­per in this role?

Neill: All of that tech stack [at Mas­ter­card] fas­ci­nat­ed me, and we were doing lots of work on being able to con­vert our core pay­ments rails at a nation­al lev­el into dif­fer­ent forms of enable­ment through dig­i­tal asset activity.

One of the chal­lenges that Mas­ter­card will have — and I saw the same chal­lenges at Stan­dard Char­tered and Deutsche Bank — is that they are big, old insti­tu­tions that have been mak­ing cook­ies a cer­tain way for 50 years, and sud­den­ly now they have to piv­ot to quite a dif­fer­ent busi­ness mod­el. The chal­lenge for them is going to be that they are bound by often pre-exist­ing bank­ing leg­is­la­tion and restric­tions that pro­hib­it their abil­i­ty to piv­ot at a speed that the tech­nol­o­gy demands.

One of the rea­sons Cop­per appealed to me…is the fact that it’s pur­pose-built. It is a spe­cial­ist shop that looks at just dig­i­tal assets.

Anoth­er thing I saw that also spurred my inter­est in com­ing over to Cop­per was that Covid accel­er­at­ed that take-up of cel­lu­lar-based democ­ra­ti­za­tion of finan­cial inclusion.

Tim Neill, Cop­per Chief Risk Officer

Block­works: What will you be most focused on at Copper?

Neill: Our plan is to take the best bits of bank­ing and finan­cial oper­a­tions, but cut that against a DeFi approach. That is where we need to use those par­tic­u­lar risk gov­er­nance aspects that help sup­port the busi­ness and give a high lev­el of trust for our clients.

We basi­cal­ly need to dri­ve an agen­da where we help real­ly set a theme and a tone with­in the indus­try. We need to look at start­ing to pub­lish state­ments and whitepa­pers and approach­es to things like cus­tody ser­vices in this new style of ser­vice provision.

And the way that we can do that real­ly is by uti­liz­ing some of the brain work of the folks that are inside the shop that have come from the big hous­es and have been doing it for many years and turn that into a prag­mat­ic dig­i­tal assets method­ol­o­gy that will sat­is­fy the client expec­ta­tions but also will meet the leg­is­la­tion that’s due to come out.

We’re wait­ing for leg­is­la­tion. We want it to come, because that gives us the guide rails that we need. But in the inter­im, what we ful­ly intend to do is to inter­act with the reg­u­la­tors and the leg­is­la­tors and talk to them and under­stand what they expect from us, so we can do it the right way ear­ly. And then my hope is that we can then help influ­ence the way that should be developed.

[Our clients] are now ask­ing us about the tech­nol­o­gy stack that we’re intend­ing to use, and they’re inter­est­ed in being able to uti­lize that as a poten­tial ser­vice provider. Sim­i­lar to the way big insti­tu­tions strug­gle to change their busi­ness mod­el very fast, because we’re build­ing it from scratch, in the­o­ry we build it faster, bet­ter and more prescribed.

Block­works: What do you expect to see from a cryp­to reg­u­la­tion standpoint?

Neill: What I’m hop­ing to see leg­isla­tive-wise is a com­mon-sense approach using the tech­nol­o­gy that’s in place today. So we’re going to see the mod­ern­iza­tion of things like blockchain enablement.

The real­i­ty is that we want­ed to use enough that we’re reflec­tive of the clients’ expec­ta­tions, but we’re not look­ing to add bureau­crat­ic noise on top of what’s already there. Any­one who works in bank­ing and any­one who has to deal with banks, which is the major­i­ty of the mature mar­kets, finds it huge­ly frus­trat­ing for a bunch of reasons.

A lot of that’s come about because there’s been issues in the past with the way banks have man­aged them­selves. Because we’re look­ing at blockchain enable­ment and dis­trib­uted ledger tech­nolo­gies, many of those fun­da­men­tal issues go away — things like man-in-the-mid­dle attacks or spoof ID-type approach­es and KYC ele­ments — because of the blockchain method­ol­o­gy being used.

So what I’m hop­ing for is that the leg­is­la­tion reflects that, and we want to try to influ­ence that con­ver­sa­tion by sup­port­ing those reg­u­la­tors and talk­ing to them about what we’re build­ing, how we think it should run, cre­at­ing con­ver­sa­tions between us and coun­ter­par­ties around the world and estab­lish­ing a foot­print in those ter­ri­to­ries as a licensed busi­ness to make a state­ment to those reg­u­la­tors that we mean business.

Block­works: What part of the space do you have your eye on going forward? 

Neill: I want to see who’s going to lead the race on CBD­Cs. Which nation-state is going to come for­ward, ham­mer that peg into the ground, and say we are peg­ging against X cur­ren­cy, and it’s going to look like this, it’s going to oper­ate like this? 

When that first cen­tral bank comes for­ward and makes that state­ment, I think you’ll see an avalanche of very sim­i­lar types of evo­lu­tion take place across the cen­tral bank layers. 

Block­works: Who do you expect could be first?

Neill: I real­ly do believe they’re all wait­ing for some­one else to ham­mer in the first peg…whether it’s the Sin­ga­pore­ans, whether it’s going to be the Fed. It could be an out­lier — a France or a Den­mark — or it could even be wider afield out of Africa.

Many of the cen­tral banks par­tic­u­lar­ly across the [Gulf Coop­er­a­tion Coun­cil] states — the UAE, Sau­di, Qatar — are very advanced, and I wouldn’t be sur­prised if one of them pops up first with per­haps some­thing like an oil and gas peg­ging or a gold align­ment. That would make a lot of sense, and you could see how they could lever­age that.

That’s a very excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty for us, because all of a sud­den we can start talk­ing about set­ting a cus­tody ser­vice against this whole new dig­i­tal agenda. 

This inter­view has been edit­ed for clar­i­ty and brevity.


Attend DAS:LONDON and hear how the largest Trad­Fi and cryp­to insti­tu­tions see the future of crypto’s insti­tu­tion­al adop­tion. Reg­is­ter here.


  • Ben Strack
    Ben Strack is a Den­ver-based reporter cov­er­ing macro and cryp­to-native funds, finan­cial advi­sors, struc­tured prod­ucts, and the inte­gra­tion of dig­i­tal assets and decen­tral­ized finance (DeFi) into tra­di­tion­al finance. Pri­or to join­ing Block­works, he cov­ered the asset man­age­ment indus­try for Fund Intel­li­gence and was a reporter and edi­tor for var­i­ous local news­pa­pers on Long Island. He grad­u­at­ed from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land with a degree in journalism.

    Con­tact Ben via email at [email pro­tect­ed]

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