Why Every Bank Needs 24/7 Cash Settlement Now

**Ryan Rugg** (0:00)
I think if we're successful in this industry and we continue to implement and scale, and again, I've talked about it earlier, often skate that complexity of the blockchain. We will have real-time value of money, stablecoins, tokenized deposits across the ecosystem that truly allows for that atomic settlement and DVP and rewiring the whole financial system.

**Simon Taylor** (0:31)
Welcome to Tokenized. My name is Simon Taylor and this is the show focused on stablecoins and the institutional adoption of Tokenized real-world assets. I am your host for today, author of Fintech, Brain Food and Head of Market Dev at Tempo, and I'm joined as always by my friend, my co-host for this Stablecoin Stories series. It's story time once again. It's Ran Goldi, SVP of Payments and Network at Fireblocks. How are you doing, Goldi?

**Ran Goldi** (0:55)
I am great, happy to be here again for another exciting story. This one will surprise a lot of our listeners and viewers.

**Simon Taylor** (1:06)
Will, just remind everybody what story time is all about.

**Ran Goldi** (1:09)
Well, as everyone knows, and if you're listening to our podcast here, then you definitely know that the world is now filled with stablecoins. There's issuers, there's more and more use cases, there's more, I would say, consortiums and non-consorciums popping up every day. As you've seen in our last episode, there's a lot of tectonic shifts, but people want to know what's happening behind the stories that you read on PR, behind what you're reading in LinkedIn, right? And today, we're gonna talk about the story of one of the world's largest and probably most important bank for payments.
And the bank is moving into digital asset. And that, of course, is Citibank. Simon, if you want to present our guests.

**Simon Taylor** (1:49)
Yeah. Welcome to the show, Ryan Rugg, who is global head of digital assets for Citi Token Services. How are you doing, Ryan?

**Ryan Rugg** (1:55)
Great, Simon. Thanks for having me.

**Simon Taylor** (1:57)
Good stuff. Well, thank you for being with us. You've got one heck of a story. Before we get to that story, I got to remind viewers and listeners that views of our contributions today are their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. Please don't take anything we say as tax, legal or financial advice. And reminder number two is this series is brought to you and made possible by our friends at Fireblocks. All right. For those who don't know, I'd love for you to just walk through your career a little bit, Ryan.
JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley. Then you ended up working in digital assets with IBM and R3. Now at Citi.
Is this all Richard Gendel Brown's fault? Like, what happens in this story?

**Ran Goldi** (2:38)
And does your family know that you went from being like executive director at JP Morgan into our space of blockchain? Tell us the truth.

**Ryan Rugg** (2:48)
I'm pretty sure my family still thinks I'm like a stockbroker, which I never was. I just happened to work in markets where I'm like, oh, she's a stockbroker. I'm like, I'm not a stockbroker. But it's really interesting. So I was a computer science, finance major. I started my career out in tech. But you're 21 years old. You walk into these large institutes. I thought I was going to rewire a bank. I was doing VLOOKUPs on spreadsheets. I was like, this is so boring. So I worked my way to the front office and worked in CapMarkets for 10 years and I loved it. I was doing really innovative structures for clients. But then post-crisis, after Dodd-Frank, a lot of those innovative structures you couldn't do for clients. So I went back to my roots. I started taking Python classes because I had done C++ in college. It was really fascinating.
I read an article about blockchain in 2015 I was meeting colleagues who had made the jump over into various different entities and I was fascinated. I'm like, if this technology was around when I started my career, it could completely reinvent all the financial plumbing. So then I went down the rabbit hole. I was meeting with, at the time, R3 and just more exploratory to understand the technology and what it was, and they offered me a job. It was one of those things that I looked around, I didn't want my boss's boss's job. I had been in cat markets for quite some time, and if I didn't make this career pivot, I probably never would. So I went to work for R3, was employee number 20, loved it. It was a consortium. At the time, we were 65 different banks trying to solve a lot of different issues within using blockchain technology. Similar to what's happening now, if you think about all the different consortiums that are coming out. So we went from 20 to 450 employees. I got to do everything from help raise 117 million Series A to literally sweeping the floors.