CFO.

The custodian had reached the point where finance, treasury and regulatory capital strategy needed a single owner rather than three part-time ones. Insurer conversations, banking relationships, audit cadence and the firm's regulatory capital footprint all demanded a CFO with bank-side balance-sheet experience. At the same time, the firm's products — custody, settlement, staking infrastructure — depended on a CFO who could read crypto-native mechanics as fluently as a TradFi treasurer reads collateral schedules.

The constraints were sharp. The CFO needed to be credible with the firm's institutional clients, who increasingly asked for finance-team diligence calls before depositing assets. They needed to be credible with regulators across multiple jurisdictions, where licence conditions specified named senior officers and personal accountability. Compensation reflected an executive seat at a Series A firm; geography preferred London, with flexibility for the right operator who could be present often enough.

The bench is built from two directions. Bank-side finance leaders with genuine crypto literacy — not just exposure — and crypto-native CFOs who have already carried a firm through audit, regulatory capital and institutional onboarding. Both groups are small; the overlap is smaller still. Most senior bank finance leaders interested in crypto have moved into investment roles or advisory work rather than line CFO seats; most crypto-native CFOs are already in seats they will not leave at this stage.

Our read was that the search would be solved by depth in two specific overlaps: people who had been deputy CFO or Head of Finance inside a bank's digital assets business and were ready for the full seat, and people who had been CFO at an earlier-stage custodian or exchange and were ready to scale. Craig led the conversations directly. The firm's lead investor sat in on the second-round assessments, which compressed the close.

The shortlist drew from bank-side digital assets finance leaders stepping into a full CFO seat, and from CFOs of earlier-stage custodians and regulated crypto firms ready to scale.

• Deputy CFOs from bank-side digital assets units ready for the seat.
• Operators who had been CFO at an earlier-stage custodian or exchange.
• Finance leaders from regulated infrastructure firms in adjacent verticals.
• A small set of crossover candidates from insurance-regulated firms with named-officer experience.

The placement was a bank-side digital assets finance leader who had spent four years building out the finance function for a major bank's digital assets desk before moving in-house to a regulated custodian as Head of Finance. What made them right was the way they had already lived inside the named-officer regime that the custodian's licences required, and the calm with which they answered the regulatory capital question in the first board meeting — not as a constraint but as a competitive advantage if the firm sequenced its product roadmap around it.

The close benefited from the investor's early involvement. The offer was assembled in a single working session and signed on the tenth week. The CFO's personal economics were aligned to the firm's regulated capital efficiency rather than to top-line metrics, which the candidate had requested in the second meeting.

“The lesson was about the value of presenting a tightly framed brief to a small, well-mapped bench rather than a broad search to a wide one. A wider net would have produced more conversations and fewer real candidates. By naming the load-bearing requirement — named-officer regulatory experience plus crypto fluency — in the opening week and refusing to soften it, the search closed in ten weeks rather than fifteen. The work was done in the first month; the rest was sequencing.”

— Craig Oliver