Our focus on the institutional space

The next phase of our institutional strategy

Capping off a period of product focus, today we welcome our Head of Institutional Coverage, Brett Tejpaul

By Emilie Choi, Chief Operating Officer

Over the past 12 months, Coinbase has been laser focused on building out the types of features and services that our institutional customers need. Since the launch of our institutional suite in May 2018, the maturation of crypto as an asset class has progressed at a rapid pace. Today, Coinbase plays a lead role in a thriving ecosystem of institutional crypto offerings.

It’s against this backdrop that today we’re introducing Brett Tejpaul as our Head of Institutional Coverage. Brett joins us from Barclays, where he spent 17 years in global leadership positions in both the U.S. and the UK. During his tenure at Barclays, Brett held a range of roles including Global Head of Sales (across all of Fixed Income and Equities) and Global Head of Credit and Commodities, along with serving on the Market Executive Committee, a five-person team responsible for managing the entirety of Barclays’ Markets businesses. In addition to his product focused leadership roles, Brett also led client strategy and pioneered Barclays’ first “Head of Digital” role, which included managing Barclays’ fintech venture investments.

A theme in Brett’s career has been building new kinds of businesses within traditional finance — a great fit for this particular role where he’ll be making connections between finance 1.0 and the cryptoeconomy. In his new role at Coinbase, Brett and his teams in New York, San Francisco, the UK and Asia will be focused on the continued institutionalization of crypto. This includes continuing to expand our institutional client base, building out our coverage team, introducing new features and services that institutional investors expect, and continuing to educate the institutional community about crypto as an asset class and its role within a diversified portfolio.

Brett joins Coinbase at a time when we’ve never been better positioned to serve institutional and professional investors. Across the company, our teams have been working tirelessly to build a suite of institutional-grade products and services designed in a way that’s familiar to professional investors, yet specialized enough to take advantage of everything that makes crypto a truly unique asset class.

Our exchange, Coinbase Pro, has rolled out margin trading to institutional investors in 45 states across the US, along with a portfolio feature that allows traders to segregate trading strategies and operate multiple managed client accounts, and a powerful, yet intuitive mobile trading platform for iOS and Android devices. Our institutional-grade custodian, Coinbase Custody, recently topped more than $8 billion in crypto assets stored, and is the only crypto custodian to attain both its SOC1 and SOC2 compliance reports. This builds on a strong year for Coinbase Custody where, in other firsts, we brought unique crypto-native features like Tezos Staking and Compound Governance to our clients around the world.

We couldn’t be more excited for the future of institutional crypto. Over the coming months, we’ll be rolling out more features and updates that will set the standard for professional crypto investment platforms.

Our focus on the institutional space was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.