We are happy to announce that Bjørn Holta, experienced finance and asset management professional with many years of experience joins our team in order to strengthen our approach and access to asset managers and institutional organizations interested in tokenization.
Bjørn Holta has experience from two decades in alternative investment management and investment banking roles in New York, Tokyo and Oslo.
After leading hedge fund sales at Salmon Smith Barney out of New York and Tokyo, he drove research due-diligence at Evolution Capital, MCP Asset Management and Alchemy Fund in different parts of the corporate capital structure within multiple investment strategies.
As Bjørn explains it in his own words:
As VP of business development, I am looking forward to helping drive adoption of security tokenization as an integral part of the DigiShares team. All kudos to the team that has managed to develop a product that promotes productivity, efficiency and profitability for the end customer rather than the semantics side of blockchain. I hope to do my best to support what has been built, by adding some financial flair and drive customer engagement.
One industry view I subscribe to is that security tokenization will require both its fair share of quantity and quality of projects to thrive properly. Regardless of what part of the capital structure (equity, debt, preferred) the security tokens represent, it is the basics – good quality projects, whether defined by sound fundamentals, unique characteristics or underserved segments that will drive adoption at large. Large fund net-inflows from new sources begets more flows and helps closure of the illiquidity premium for real assets like real estate. This should follow the path of corporate debt markets where institutional participation in liquidity pools has helped close this illiquidity premium and help our customers.
At its core, the simplest value proposition that is closer to universal truths than metrics is the certainty of ownership that on-chain data can provide. Unfortunately for our asset manager customers, it is a bit more complex. DigiShares’ current and future clients need proper units of account in terms of what DigiShares product offering offers in the context – productivity, efficiency and profitability. With this regard, my own path comes from the standpoint of a not-so-innocent bystander in traditional finance – raising capital and running money for financial institutions.
My own experiences have made me increasingly cognisant of how hard it is to actually deliver this profitability in the form of stable outsized-returns or “alpha” for client fiduciaries. It is not easy. At one point I spent several years of salary paying for administration and back-office fees while trying to scale the fund. Both time and cost could have been saved substantially through tokenization.
In my new role, it boils down to helping our customers, many whom are in the nascent adoption stage and running a business where productivity and efficiency is equally as important as profitability. It is work in progress, but I hope to bring the combination of these value propositions to the forefront, seek out both good projects and sufficient scale.
Bjørn’s LinkedIn profile can be found here.
Digital Securities & Tokenization Summit
We are proud to announce tickets for the third installment of the conference Fintech Disruption Summit, and still available.
The Summit has traditionally been visited by 100-200 delegates. First time it was physical but the last one was virtual, as will this one be. We are aiming for 250-500 delegates this time around.
The goal with the Summit is to educate and motivate the traditional financial industry to adopt blockchain and tokenization technology, so delegates will be non-blockchain non-crypto people from the traditional industry. The Summit spans two days and the schedule has been adjusted to cover both EU and US delegates and speakers.
We will market the Summit massively through our channels as well as the channels of our partners and sponsors. The goal is to make it one of the top global events focused on tokenization targeted towards the traditional industry. There will be tracks focused on legal, market status, future visions, real estate tokenization, etc.
Stay tuned for updates in the newsletter.
Speaker’s requests form is here.
