Leading Financial Markets Lawyer Ciarán McGonagle Joins Tokenovate as Chief Legal and Product Officer
July 01 2024 - 1:34AM
Tokenovate, a company specialising in trade lifecycle event
management, is pleased to announce the appointment of Ciarán
McGonagle as Chief Legal and Product Officer. In this new role,
Ciarán will lead the creation and execution of its legal-first
product vision and strategy, while also serving as in-house
counsel, as the company embarks on its next phase of developments.
Ciarán joins from ISDA, where he served as Assistant General
Counsel focusing on digital assets and smart contracts. During
Ciarán’s time at ISDA he contributed to the ongoing development of
the Common Domain Model (CDM), co-led development of the Digital
Asset Derivatives Definitions, advanced ISDA’s work on
tokenisation, and coordinated ISDA’s legal work across multiple EU
regulatory initiatives including EMIR, CSDR and the BRRD.
Additionally, Ciarán has led several industry groups including
ISDA’s Digital Asset Legal Group and Legal Technology Group, and is
a highly respected and active contributor to industry initiatives,
including those led by the Financial Markets and Law Committee, UK
Jurisdiction Taskforce, and the UK Law Commission.
Prior to ISDA, Ciarán was a Vice President at Deutsche Bank, an
Associate at Morgan Stanley and, after completing his Law degree at
Queens in Belfast, trained at Allen & Overy in London. Ciarán
has published numerous articles and opinion pieces, and together
with Professor Christopher Clack at UCL, authored the seminal
“Smart Derivatives Contracts: the ISDA Master Agreement and the
automation of payments and deliveries” whitepaper published in
2019.
Ciarán will bring to Tokenovate extensive legal expertise and
experience, and deep understanding of digital assets, technologies,
markets and smart contracts. His strong reputation and track record
as an industry force for change will help Tokenovate to drive
forward the next phase of its growth strategy.
Richard Baker, Tokenovate co-founder and CEO welcomed Ciarán
to the team saying: “We are delighted to have Ciarán on
board. We firmly believe that the end-to-end lifecycle of a
tokenised financial asset, and its representation as a tradeable
derivative, must be rooted in legal-first engineering principles.
Code is not law, law is law!”
He continued “Ciarán's significant regulatory and legal
expertise, coupled with his exceptional track record in driving
innovation and change in the derivatives industry, will greatly
enhance our strategy for product and platform development. We can’t
wait to start working with Ciarán, and to leverage his extensive
legal knowledge, proven ability to drive policy and product
development, and expertise in navigating complex regulatory
environments to advance our product vision and strategy.”
Ciarán McGonagle said: “Over the past few years I’ve had
the opportunity to witness first hand how Tokenovate operates,
especially with regard to its commitment to integrating traditional
industry standards and protocols, like the Common Domain Model,
within its cutting-edge, digitised framework for programmatic
lifecycle event management. I am excited to join Tokenovate’s
highly innovative team and to contribute to delivering the next
phase of its go-to-market strategy.”
-ENDS-
About Tokenovate
The path to distributed financial market
infrastructure.
Tokenovate is a UK-based financial services technology company
providing distributed financial market infrastructure, including
tokenisation and blockchain-powered smart contracts, enabling
post-trade lifecycle event management of workflows for OTC and
exchange traded derivatives. Through digitising the pre-trade to
post-trade workflow, Tokenovate’s innovative programmatic lifecycle
event management software can be integrated with existing trading
platforms to deliver genuine end-to-end benefits. The platform
comprises several core components that in combination fill the
functional gap between legal contract formation and trade
execution.
Media contacts:
Richard Baker, CEO and Founder: richard.baker@tokenovate.com
Tina Kane, The Realization Group:
tina.kane@therealizationgroup.com
Richard Baker, CEO and Founder: richard.baker@tokenovate.com
Tina Kane, The Realization Group: tina.kane@therealizationgroup.com