FalconX, a digital assets platform for institutional investors, announced that Baris Cetinok has joined the team as Chief Product Officer.
As a product and technology veteran with more than 25 years of experience, Cetinok has played an integral role in “shaping important business initiatives and delivering exceptional products for some of the world’s most renowned brands, including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and American Express.”
Immediately prior to joining FalconX, Cetinok “led product teams for Robinhood’s Brokerage, Trading and Clearing platforms.”
Before leading platform product teams at Robinhood, he served “in key leadership roles at Apple for a decade, including Senior Director of product management for Apple Wallet, Apple Pay and iCloud.”
In that position, he “developed the product vision, product roadmap and led global product marketing.” His contributions “led to Apple Pay’s expansion to 60-plus countries, more than 10,000 banks, millions of merchants and hundreds of millions of consumers.”
Cetinok’s extensive product management, product marketing and strategy skills “are uniquely suited to extend the strong momentum FalconX is experiencing as institutional investors are gravitating towards brokerages given recent market conditions.”
Cetinok said:
“Post-FTX fallout, there’s a growing need among institutional investors to improve risk management and trade more efficiently. It’s an honor to join a company creating dependable infrastructure that facilitates global investor access to crypto while enabling the tokenization of traditional assets.”
Early in his career, Cetinok served “as Senior Vice President of product management and design at American Express for the company’s Enterprise Growth team as it drove international expansion and focused on improving the consumer experience.”
Prior to that, he “led the consumer rollout of Amazon Payments at Amazon.”
Cetinok began his career “at Microsoft and spent more than a decade with the company, serving in leadership roles in the Internet Technologies division and for Microsoft Office.”
FalconX CEO Raghu Yarlagadda said:
“As a digital finance pioneer who created and implemented product roadmaps for some of the world’s leading companies, Baris has the product and leadership skills to create value worldwide and take FalconX to the next level. We’re excited for Baris to help us continue scaling FalconX as we deliver value to the institutional investor community.”
As noted in the update, FalconX is “a fully comprehensive digital asset platform that allows institutions to access and manage all of their crypto strategies through a single interface and seamless workflows, making it easy to execute trading, credit and clearing all in one place.”
FalconX’s crypto-as-a-service offering “powers leading banks, FinTech institutions and investment applications to easily add crypto to their product offerings with a goal of enabling the next billion users to enter the crypto space.”
The company is “backed by investors including Accel, Adams Street Partners, Altimeter Capital, American Express Ventures, B Capital, GIC, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Thoma Bravo, Tiger Global Management and Wellington Management.”
FalconX reportedly “has offices in Silicon Valley, New York, Chicago, Bengaluru and Malta.”