The 2016 Fintech Finance 35: Hyder Jaffrey

2016-11-jeffrey-kutler-fintech-35-hyder-jaffrey-small.jpg

< Fintech’s Most Powerful Dealmakers of 2016

30. Hyder Jaffrey
Head, Strategic Investment and Fintech Innovation
UBS
PNR

The recent resignation of UBS senior innovation manager Alex Batlin (No. 28 last year) brought Hyder Jaffrey into the fintech spotlight at the Swiss banking giant, which has gained renown as a promoter of start-up activity and an advocate of blockchain technology. “I enjoy being an instigator of change,” says Jaffrey, a six-year UBS veteran based in London. After initially working on the UBS Neo multiasset trading platform, he turned his attention to blockchain and distributed ledger in 2014. As head of strategic investment and fintech innovation, the 52-year-old currently splits his time between the investment bank and UBS’s Crypto 2.0 lab at the Level39 accelerator in Canary Wharf. “The role today focuses on business model innovation — how capital markets business models can be innovated through the use of financial technology,” he says. In August, Banco Santander, Bank of New York Mellon Corp., Deutsche Bank, and ICAP joined UBS’s Utility Settlement Coin project for blockchain-based settlement of securities transactions. Jaffrey sees the effort as part of a medium- to long-term “evolution of a market space, but it is absolutely fundamental for seeing the benefits of the distributed ledger technologies that many people are talking about now.” Separately, UBS last year held a Future of Finance Challenge, offering prizes that included $50,000 to the winning entrepreneur, algorithm testing and analysis company Aesthetic Integration. This year UBS joined with Credit Suisse and other Swiss companies in supporting a fintech initiative within Zurich’s Kickstart Accelerator. Jaffrey knows entrepreneurship firsthand. After graduating from Loughborough University in the U.K. in 1988, he went into computer systems development and consulting. Melding those skills with a growing familiarity with financial markets, in 2002 he became CEO of start-up, web-based debt issuance platform Marketpipe. In 2007 the company was acquired by data and analytics provider Ipreo; Jaffrey stayed on as global head of fixed income until 2009 — just as the fintech phenomenon was beginning to take off.

The 2016 Fintech Finance 35