Tokenovate, a UK financial technology company providing post-trade workflows-as-a-service and programmable settlement solutions, has appointed Dr Alec Burns as its new head of product technology.
Burns joins the leadership team with a mandate to sharpen product strategy, widen institutional adoption of the platform and push forward the firm’s technology roadmap.
His responsibilities will cover product strategy, user experience and delivery, drawing together the company’s work on digital legal agreements, the practical application of the FINOS Common Domain Model and programmable settlement.
These areas underpin Tokenovate’s approach of building post-trade automation around agreed legal terms first, converting them into standardised data and predictable lifecycle processes so that approved events generate consistent, auditable results throughout the post-trade cycle. Central to this is Novat, the company’s post-trade orchestration layer, which models contractual rights and obligations as individual settlement states.
Burns brings over ten years of experience spanning artificial intelligence, blockchain, robotics and product development to the role. He previously established the AI product division at VeChain, and through his own AI advisory firm, Metis Point, has guided large enterprises worth billions of dollars on AI strategy and execution.
Working from Tokenovate’s current architecture, Burns will also contribute to embedding AI functions within the company’s products and future plans, concentrating on configuration, testing, exception handling and operational visibility, while ensuring contractual terms and set lifecycle events remain the ultimate authority.
Richard Baker, CEO and Founder of Tokenovate said, “Tokenisation is changing market infrastructure, while legal certainty, common semantics and deterministic processing remain essential. Our focus is on giving institutions a practical way to automate post-trade processes while working across existing and emerging infrastructure.
“We appointed Alec because he combines a strong understanding of blockchain and AI with the product discipline required to turn complex engineering into dependable institutional software. That combination will be important as we scale deployment and adoption.”
Tokenovate Head of Product Technology Dr Alec Burns said, “Tokenovate’s legal-first architecture keeps contractual intent, economic state and settlement outcomes synchronised across systems. My focus is to make that architecture composable, straightforward to deploy and ready for institutional scale, while applying AI and distributed technology with engineering discipline.”
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