Crypto Custodian Anchorage Teases Growth Plan With 2 Executive Hires

Anchorage now has six executives in its C-suite, hiring a head of finance and head of sales with experience in both tech and Wall Street.

Julie Veltman, who’s joining the crypto custodian as head of finance, has issued new asset-backed securitizations for Merrill Lynch’s Structured Product Capital Markets group. She also built out a broker-dealer, debt issuance platform and fixed-income trading business for financial services firm Cohen & Company. Most recently, Veltman drove financial planning, reporting, and efficiency at Salesforce. 

Geoff Clauss, who’s joining Anchorage as head of sales, has more than two decades of experience in private equity, wealth management and fintech. Before Anchorage, Clauss spent seven years overseeing sales at wealth management platform Addepar. He also spent 15 years at investment software company Advent. 

Veltman will oversee operational finance, day-to-day operations and the firm’s prime brokerage products. The fact that Veltman’s experience extends far beyond Anchorage’s current products is a sign of where the firm wants to go, said co-founder and President Diogo Mónica.

“It’s pretty obvious that Anchorage has larger ambitions than its current set of services,” he said. “I think you can start following the breadcrumbs and seeing where the direction of the company is going – Julie’s background is absolutely perfect for where we want to go with the company.”

With the new hires, this will be the first time the custodian has employees with “this deep of a bench” running the sales and finance sides of the business, Mónica said. While the company won’t be hiring any more executives in the near future, it does continue to hire more employees throughout the current economic crisis. 

“We’re rounding out our executive team and it really feels internally like we’re getting to the next step of execution of the company and maturity of the company,” he said.

Sometime in the near future, Anchorage is going to announce new products related to quantitative analysis and risk modeling from its Merkle Data acquisition in January, Mónica added.

“We’ve already integrated a lot of the work that they’ve done, and we’re going to be launching some products that actually rely heavily on their work pretty soon,” Mónica said.