Cred Taps Former NSA, Western Union Bosses for Leadership Team

Decentralized lending platform Cred has welcomed former National Security Agency computer scientist Bethany De Lude and Western Union executive Daniel Goldstein as chief information security officer (CISO) and chief technology officer (CTO) respectively, the firm announced Monday.

Dan Schatt, Cred’s chief executive, told CoinDesk the crypto community stands to benefit a great deal from a financial infrastructure that supports the banking of tokens. That the new executives were willing to come in from the traditional financial sector is indicative of an overall maturing of the blockchain community, and a growing consensus that the technology is here to stay, he claimed. 

“You really feel like the tides are turning with people feeling like they don’t have to take such a huge career risk to come into this space,” Schatt said. 

Prior to joining Cred, De Lude served as the first CISO of the Federal Judicial Center, the research arm of the U.S. judiciary, and held security leadership roles at the NSA and multinational accounting firm PWC. Most recently, she was the CISO at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), a non-profit tasked with supervising auditors for publicly traded companies. In a statement, De Lude said she was eager to bring her knowledge of information security “to help Cred build a world-class security organization” as it continues to grow.

“Cred was really built as an infrastructure to bridge the divide between the crypto community and mainstream finance. And that’s what we’ve done. I think that’s what’s so attractive to people like Bethany, because we’re helping to bridge understanding across and on multiple fronts,” Schatt said. 

According to Schatt, Cred wanted Daniel Goldstein in the role of CTO with specific technical innovations in mind. In Schatt’s view, increasingly, people will be holding their crypto assets in noncustodial wallets. 

“That’s one area that we’re putting a tremendous emphasis on and it’s one area that [Goldstein] knows very well having spent a lot of time building microservices and also building his own crypto assets,” Schatt said. 

Before joining Cred, Goldstein served as vice president of digital engineering at Western Union. He also held senior management roles at cybersecurity firm Symantec and Emergent Technology Holdings, a company that facilitates global commerce in emerging markets through innovative technologies. According to a press statement by Cred, Goldstein led the development of Emergent Technology’s Responsible Gold supply chain solution, a blockchain application that tracks gold from mining to vault and its G-Coin digital token. 

“I’m thrilled to support Cred’s mission of providing more equitable and inclusive financial and services utilizing the best of blockchain and traditional fintech,” Goldstein said in the press statement. 

Cred is a global financial services platform with customers in 190 countries. Last year, Cred partnered with a number of crypto exchanges including Binance in a bid to open up its operations to more markets and users. According to Schatt, Cred’s core philosophy is to create equitable and inclusive financial services surrounding credit.

“You can’t build a company like that and believe in that unless you believe in doing it internally as well,” Schatt said.