All aboard: Bitcoin’s rise inspires even big banks to staff up on crypto talent

This edition of Workforce Insights is reported and written by Devin Banerjee.

What would Alexander Hamilton think of Bitcoin?

While we’ll never know, the bank he helped create 237 years ago is now staffing up on cryptocurrency talent. BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custodian of assets, is among big banks where professionals with crypto expertise are increasingly flocking.

That’s according to a new analysis by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team, which finds that major financial services firms will add more than three times as many staff steeped in digital-asset experience this year than in 2015. That pace jumped 40% in the first half of 2021 alone, compared with the same period last year.

“The opportunities in digital assets are plentiful,” BNY Mellon’s Roman Regelman, the bank’s CEO of asset servicing and head of digital, told LinkedIn News. “We can now attract talent in a very different way.”

The meteoric rise of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which hit another all-time-high last week, is goading longstanding banks to race to catch up with client demand. More institutions now custody — or verify and safeguard — digital assets, and wealth-management divisions at several banks have begun offering crypto funds to clients. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who says he personally doesn’t understand Bitcoin’s value but allows customers access to it, explains he’s simply serving clients what they want.

The result: Demand for cryptocurrency talent is the highest it’s ever been. Data from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team show that U.S. job postings with terms like “crypto” or “blockchain” grew 615% in August from a year earlier, with JPMorgan among the top employers hiring for such roles.

Even some of the industry’s most senior figures are reshaping their careers in response to the promise of financial technology, or fintech.

“The financial services industry is all about continued reinvention, and the power of technology has been dramatic,” Brady Dougan, who helmed Credit Suisse from 2007 to 2015, told LinkedIn News. Dougan now leads digital-banking company Exos Financial.

Dan Morehead started his career at Goldman Sachs in 1987 and worked at big banks for another decade before dedicating his time and efforts to trading based on macroeconomic themes. In 2014, after being introduced to Bitcoin, he turned his hedge fund’s focus solely to cryptocurrencies and crypto-related companies.

“When I got introduced to Bitcoin, it took a while to get my head around it,” he said. “Ultimately I decided that you could make 10 times your money or 100 times your money investing in it.”

To Morehead, the biggest change in the crypto ecosystem in recent years has been this entry of institutions such as banks, investment-management firms, pension funds and more. Largely driven by client demand for cryptocurrencies and related investment opportunities, “all of them realize they need to figure this out,” he said.

Figuring it out isn’t always easy. Banks are often bringing in candidates who have never stepped foot in a bank before. While they may be excited to apply their technical knowledge and skills to larger, more established institutions, fintech-related culture clashes occur all the time when ‘fin’ meets ‘tech’ in the workplace.

“Picture a traditional banker, and then picture an innovator,” said BNY Mellon’s Regelman, holding up two hands, his palms facing each other. “You have two completely different images in front of you.”

When he’s hiring, Regelman said he looks for bankers who can innovate or innovators who can work within a highly regulated environment. “These people are not that easy to find,” he concedes, but there are steps that BNY Mellon has taken to attract top crypto and fintech talent.

Diversity is more important than ever, he said, and it has the power to turn traditional banks into “magnets” for talent within financial services. An agile culture is a necessity, allowing tech-minded hires to work at a faster speed. A performance-oriented culture — which financial firms tend to have — helps candidates feel confident they can hit the ground running and measure their progress along the way. Also required, according to Regelman, is a culture that’s much more transparent than the industry is accustomed to.

“When you bring transparency, when you have the right dialogue and when you have an uncompromising attitude toward these cultural improvements, that’s when you can work at a very different speed,” he said.

Kelly Mathieson spent 26 years at JPMorgan, most recently leading global collateral management and securities clearing, before joining fintech company Digital Asset in 2016. For her, the attraction was the opportunity to bring traditional business-minded cultures closer together with technologists, rather than always consider them to be separate species.

“It’s a much closer working model than what we’ve known in the past,” she said. “And that’s what’s rewarding.”

Methodology

LinkedIn Economic Graph researchers examined full-time, paid jobs posted in the U.S. containing the keywords “cryptocurrency,” “crypto,” “blockchain,” “Bitcoin” and “Ethereum.” LinkedIn members are identified as having cryptocurrency experience according to current and past job titles.