Digital currency company Blockchain has announced that former Barclays Group CEO Antony Jenkins has joined its board of Blockchain at a time when the company is experiencing accelerated growth from its beginnings as small fintech start-up founded in York, UK. Jenkins’ experience and network in the traditional financial sector will help facilitate the next phase of growth – mass adoption of blockchain technology.
Blockchain CEO and Co-Founder, Peter Smith commented: “A CEO of Antony’s calibre joining our board is a clear sign of where the financial future lies. His experience will help Blockchain revolutionize the financial system as we know it and enable billions across the globe to have a better, more efficient and more secure, financial future.”
Blockchain, which now runs the world’s largest production blockchain platform, has reported a record year of growth in 2016. The company has doubled the number of bitcoin wallets provided to over 10M, and now powers over 150,000 transactions a day around the world - up from a few thousand per day a few years ago.
Jenkins remarked: “Blockchain technology has the potential to reinvent the way we use money and contribute to a finance system that’s high quality, low cost, secure, fair and transparent. I am proud to join a company playing a pivotal role in ushering in a new era.”
In the three years leading up to July 2015, Jenkins led Barclays as CEO in a period of recession whilst achieving a share price rise of over 50%. He also significantly improved the bank’s ethical business standards and reputation. Mr. Jenkins also spent 17 years at Citi where he ran the North American Cash Management unit, managed the company’s Internet activities and was in charge of the Citi branded credit card business.
Harnessing the power of technology has been an important theme throughout his career and he predicts that over the next 10 years the industry will see a number of very significant disruptions in financial services driven by companies in the fintech sector. At Barclays, he was influential in the launch of the company’s Pingit mobile payments app. Jenkins predicts that new financial technology businesses will create a financial system that’s high quality, low cost, fair and transparent, and therefore serves customers better, reduces risk to society and improves returns to shareholders.
In October 2016, he launched 10x Future Technologies to transform the ways banks operate by enabling them to mine data in a much more sophisticated way and offer customers superior, faster and cheaper services. He’s also the non-executive Chairman of Currencies Direct, a non-bank provider of foreign exchange and international payment services.
