The Crypto industry darling Coinbase has aggressive growth plans for its newly created New York office. How? Coinbase hiring new employees is an attempt to attract institutional clients. The digital assets exchange plans to expand its numbers to 150 employees from 20 currently. According to the company, the bearish market has not yet quelled institutional demand for this asset class.
“When we saw the market begin to correct, which we all expected, institutions didn’t lose interest,” Adam White, general manager of Coinbase Institutional, told CoinDesk. “It was exactly the opposite”. He further added that “They [Institutions] look at it as an opportunity to enter when things are not too frothy.”
Many of the local staff members (20) were hired away from your more traditional financial institutions such as the NYSE, Barclays, and Citigroup.
New York “is an incredibly deep pool of talent,” White said during an event Thursday celebrating the opening of its first permanent location in the city (it previously had its employees working out of a WeWork there).
“We have to create a bridge between financial services and technology,” he went on. “In order to do that, we need to pull from some of the best and brightest minds that have worked their whole careers in other kinds of traditional financial firms.”
To make potential corporate clients comfortable when they visit Coinbase’s NY office, they have a security staff comparable to the NYSE’s, according to Coinbase’s head of institutional sales, Christine Sandler, who previously worked at the Big Board.
And yet, Sandler says that Coinbase’s institutional custody, asset management, and trading services and products shouldn’t be seen as conflicting with its previous focus on retail investors (geared towards everyday people). In fact, she believes that institutional distribution is the key to mainstream adoption.
“We want to partner with appropriate institutions to help the whole ecosystem grow,” she told CoinDesk. “It’s not ‘institutional or retail,’ because a lot of these institutions will be distributors.”
Looking holistically at Coinbase as a company, they’ve been on a hiring spree (external link https://www.businessinsider.com/coinbase-doubles-staff-to-500-2018-9) all through the 2018 bear market, and now has more than 500 employees worldwide. New York is only one office attracting institutional clients and recruits. Coinbase is acively seeking expansion in Asian and Latin America “pretty quickly” according to White. Coinbase has an office in Tokyo, has hired a small team, and is applying for a Financial Services Agency certification in Japan.
Finally, White ended by stating that “we’re committed to not being a U.S. company.”
Could this be the push by Coinbase? Remember, Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong says that Crypto will reach 1 billion people in five years . Will Coinbase’s future be bright?
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