There’s a well-known error often seen in the news, in which the journalist will report a concerning data point related to some topic, without looking at a trend over time. Take for instance, the number of women graduating with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 2022. It is over 40% in the US, which means that 60% of math degrees are going to men. That’s a huge gap.
But that is not the story here. What is much more interesting is that the percentage of women receiving maths degrees in the 1970s was 17%, and this has risen determinedly and without pause for 50 years. This story repeats itself in physics, biological sciences and finance. And it is becoming more visible in executive suites.
It is a story of breaking down barriers, of a wave of women entering the workforce and doing things that were the traditional preserve of men. There’s no parity yet, but don’t be fooled by the data point; look at the trend.
Which brings us to shine the spotlight on a new industry that has emerged, one at the nexus between blockchain and finance. Blockchain was introduced to the wider world in 2008 as the cryptographically secure technology underpinning bitcoin, and of course blockchain innovation as it intersects with the heady world of finance, had been quietly burbling away for decades, as an almost exclusively male domain.
But for this exclusive club, too, the winds of change have arrived. Strong, experienced and impactful leaders have entered the financial technology realm to make it more trustworthy – and many of them are female.
We need to mention Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of Custodia Bank, or Cathy Wood, CEO of Ark Investments, or Rebecca Black, CEO of BlockFi, or Elizabeth Stark, co-founder and CEO of Lightning Labs, or Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer of CoinShares, and a long list of others, firmly taking their seats at the table – from those leading product and software development teams, to those in the executive suites, all of them in the cauldron of innovation, swirling around blockchain and finance.
Introducing Connie Bloem
The numbers are still small – only 4.9% of blockchain and crypto founders are women. But the entire industry is only just emerging from its “Wild West” phase. And yes, we must remember to look at the trend, not at the data point.
And so we introduce Connie Bloem, one of the new generation of women building the future of finance. She is the MD of Mesh.trade, a Netherlands-based company that has launched a pioneering platform at the intersection of traditional finance and the blockchain, the fastest growing and most important sector in the world of finance today. Mesh focuses on making financial markets accessible to all, easier to use and more transparent through the tokenisation of real-world assets on the blockchain. Unknown in 2020, this sector will, according to BCG, exceed US$16-trillion by 2030.
Bloem saw this before most, turning her back on a successful traditional banking technology career, to start Mesh.trade in 2019. She surrounded herself with a core group of technology, marketing and finance visionaries, and quietly spent three years developing one of the most advanced multi-sided financial markets and asset tokenisation platforms in the industry, taking the immense complexity of the traditional capital markets and compressing it into an elegant flow. Mesh had been tested and hardened before most people had woken up to the explosive potential of this new industry, whose heft will make cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens, the metaverse and the other shiny toys of the cryptoverse look pallid in comparison by the end of this decade.
Bloem knows her turf, all the way from the technical minutiae of the blockchain and the complexities of traditional debt and equity issuances, to the vagaries of financial regulations. She spends her time with hardcore developers, product managers, marketers, lawyers, investors and issuers, and she can stand authoritatively in front of a boardroom table, mainly filled with sceptical traditionalists who represent a legacy financial industry, painting a compelling picture for them of what the future of their industry will look like.
“To build a business that truly delivers value to its clients, you must understand all sides of the challenge,” Bloem says. “I understand the responsibility of traditional finance, I understand the constraints of regulators playing catch-up, I understand risk, but I also see how this new technology can unlock massive value, not only for the issuers on one side of a trade but also for the investors on the other. That is the promise of blockchain and with it we have created an enabling platform that will make the capital markets more accessible to all.”
Bloem tells us that she comes from six generations of strong, educated women and believes that this is what gives her the drive required to reimagine and reshape her industry.
Her passion and determination are inspiring. What we are sure about is that Connie Bloem is not a data point.
- The author, Luisa Mazinter, is chief growth officer at Mesh.trade
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