Paul Camp, former head of JP Morgan Chase’s global transaction services business, has become the latest executive to migrate from traditional banking and finance to the digital currency industry, joining startup Circle Internet Financial as CFO.
Circle, a bitcoin payments processor, hired Camp after a year-long recruitment process. He will also serve as corporate treasurer and executive vice president of financial operations at Circle.
“We’ve been interested in trying to find an additional partner on the team with highly relevant leadership capacity,” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire told the The New York Times. “Paul had grown up in that core payments infrastructure. That was really a key piece of what we were looking for.”
Allaire cited Camp’s wealth of knowledge from his years serving in the banking system, which include helping Deutsche Bank establish itself as a leader in euro settlements and payments.
While there has yet to be a diaspora of bank executives to the cryptocurrency industry, the Times said Camp’s move is “another indication that leaders in the traditional financial services industry are now taking digital money seriously.”
In October, as CoinDesk reports, former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt joined the advisory boards of BitPay and Mirror, while last month finance veteran and banking family scion Matthew Mellon took on a volunteer leadership role at the Chamber of Digital Commerce.
“I think the vision of an Internet platform — a common Internet platform for value exchange — really captured his imagination,” Allaire told CoinDesk. “I think he’s also at the point in his career where he’s grown these businesses within big companies and was really excited to build something from the ground up.”
Circle, based in Boston, has secured $26 million in venture financing. It is one of a number of startups that are hoping to upend the established system of transferring money.
Ironically, Camp’s former boss at JPMorgan, CEO Jamie Dimon, has expressed disdain for virtual currency, calling bitcoin “a terrible store of value.”
“The question isn’t whether we accept it,” he told CNBC in January. “The question is, do we even participate in people who facilitate bitcoin?”
Source: The New York Times