Head of Risk.

The issuer had reached the point where risk needed an executive owner rather than a coordinated set of functional contributions. Reserve composition, banking concentration, redemption mechanics, custody risk and the firm's MiCA-aligned operational risk programme each had its own owner; what was missing was the framework that connected them and the senior officer who could carry the regulator-facing accountability. The CEO wanted a Head of Risk who could be the single point of clarity for the board, the regulators and the firm's institutional partners.

The constraints were demanding. The Head of Risk needed institutional-grade risk leadership — bank-side or large asset-manager experience handling reserve, redemption and concentration risk at scale — combined with crypto-market literacy. They needed to be regulator-credible across more than one EU jurisdiction. Compensation reflected an executive seat in a regulated firm with named-officer obligations. Geography preferred Paris or Dublin, with regular travel across the firm's other hubs.

The institutional risk bench in EU regulated finance is wide; the overlap with crypto literacy is narrow. Most senior bank risk leaders have followed the news on crypto without ever owning a position; most crypto-native risk leaders have worked at exchanges or custodians rather than at issuers, and have therefore not lived inside the reserve-management framework that defines this seat. The bench worth searching is people who moved from bank-side risk into a crypto-native firm early enough to build genuine product depth, or people who have led risk at a payments-and-issuance firm that handles client float at a comparable scale.

Our read was that the right candidate would come from the payments and e-money side as readily as from bank-side risk. Reserve management for a major stablecoin is in many respects closer to e-money safeguarding than to bank balance-sheet management, and the operators who have handled that scale of safeguarded client float know the regulator-facing rhythm intimately. Peter led every first conversation and the firm's licensing counsel joined assessments from the second round.

The shortlist drew from bank-side risk leaders with substantive crypto exposure, and from senior risk leaders at regulated e-money and payments institutions who had handled client-float frameworks at comparable scale.

• Bank-side risk leaders who had moved into crypto-native firms early.
• Senior risk leaders from regulated e-money and payments institutions.
• Risk leaders from major asset managers with stablecoin reserve mandates.
• A small set of crossover candidates from regulated custody.

The placement was a risk leader from a major regulated e-money institution who had spent the previous two years inside a crypto-native firm building out the institutional reserve and safeguarding framework. What made them right was the way they framed risk in the first board meeting — not as a control function but as a competitive advantage if the firm could demonstrate it credibly to its largest institutional partners — and the practical readiness with which they answered the named-officer questions from the licensing counsel.

The close was carefully sequenced around the candidate's existing notice period and the firm's licence-amendment timeline, which both moved at the same time. The offer signed on the eleventh week and the candidate gave notice the same day.

“The lesson was about reading the analogue. Stablecoin reserve management looks like bank balance-sheet risk on paper, but in practice it moves much closer to e-money safeguarding — and that meant the bench worth searching looked different from the first instinct. Spectrum's job in week one was to challenge the framing of the brief rather than execute it as written. The firm agreed the wider analogue early, and the right candidate emerged from the bench that wider analogue opened up.”

— Peter Wood