In a growing sign of how the clout of blockchains is increasing and how traditional banks are losing out, the chief of Natwest Mettle, Marieke Flament, has quit and has joined the blockchain company Near.
She has a wide range of experience in a variety of fields and companies including luxury company LVMH, Boston Consulting Group, hotels.com, and crypto giant Circle as well.
Highly Experienced
She has been working with Natwest Mettle for the past two and a half years and now she seems to have decided to go back into the blockchain/crypto industry. This is again a sign that the traditional financial services companies are beginning to lose not only business but also strong talent to the blockchain industry. If it has not started ringing alarms bells within the banking industry as yet, it should pretty soon.
Marieke is not new to the crypto industry having spent good time with the crypto payments company Circle where she was the managing director for the European operations. Circle has been one of the pioneers in the crypto payments industry, especially with respect to the stablecoins and this experience would be holding her in good stead. She had also contributed greatly to the growth of the company and its business by increasing the user base from practically zero to 2 million within a couple of years. She was also made the CMO leading the branding and rolling out of the USDC stablecoin which has proved to be a huge success for the company so far.
Near Ready to Go Mainstream
She will be joining Near as the CEO in January and the company is a new startup in the blockchain world which provides developers with access and tools to develop a variety of applications on its blockchain network very easily. The company had raised $800 million recently in a funding round and is said to have processed over 50 million transactions so far and it also has a large variety of partners including MoonPay, which handles the crypto to fiat conversion within the network. This partnership has also thrown up the network to people in more than 150 countries and also helped to onboard a large number of development teams who have been developing a diverse set of applications on the network. Marieke would be expected to bring in all her expertise and contacts within and outside the industry to help the network go mainstream and be considered as a challenger to the established blockchain networks.