Och-Ziff Capital Management Group’s chief financial officer, Alesia Haas, has resigned from the hedge fund firm to become CFO at cryptocurrency company Coinbase.
While Haas has already started her new role, she will be helping Och-Ziff with a transition period through June 1, according to a statement posted April 17 on Coinbase’s website. Och-Ziff announced the same day that it hired Thomas Sipp, previously a managing partner at venture firm Magis Partners, to replace her as CFO.
Coinbase, founded in 2012 as an online venue for people to buy and sell digital currencies such as bitcoin, has raised $217 million from investors including Andreesen Horowitz and Ribbit Capital, according to its website. The start-up highlighted Haas’s experience working with “highly-regulated complex financial institutions” in the announcement of her hire.
“As a fintech company, finance is core to everything that we do,” Brian Armstrong, co-founder and chief executive officer at Coinbase, said in the statement. “We plan to continue bringing the best and brightest from both finance and technology companies to help create an open financial system for the world.”
Och-Ziff, a New York-based hedge fund firm with about $32 billion of assets, has been reshuffling its senior leadership this year.
Dan Och stepped down as CEO and was replaced in February by Robert Shafir, the former chief executive of Credit Suisse Group’s Americas business and co-head of its private banking and wealth management unit. His hire marked a surprise change in succession planning at Och-Ziff, as co-chief investment officer Jimmy Levin had been expected to take over as CEO.
[II Deep Dive: When Succession Planning Goes Wrong]
Before working at Magis, which focuses on wealth management products, Sipp spent several years at Credit Suisse. He was CFO and chief operating officer of the bank’s asset management unit, as well as global COO of its $1 trillion wealth and asset management division.
“I worked closely with Tom for eight years,” Shafir said in Och-Ziff’s statement. “We look forward to welcoming him to Oz and are confident he will be a strong addition to the company.”
A spokesperson for Och-Ziff declined to comment on the leadership changes at the hedge fund.
