Mike Kessler

CEO & Founder at Tokenise

Speaker

Mike graduated in business in 1995 from Manchester and has gone onto a career in investment banking, hedge funds, compliance, private equity, regulatory hosting and tokenised securities.

After starting his career at JP Morgan in 1996 Mike built a successful track record in trading EMEA equities. In 1999 working alongside the Corporate Finance department he headed up the eBusiness strategy for equities and business development opportunities for ING, before moving to UBS.

In 2001 Mike moved into private equity for a period of 7 years and helped establish companies in the recruitment and technology sector, which were sold to a VC company, before returning to the finance industry in 2008 to launch two new funds for an established regulated fund manager.

In 2012 Mike went on to develop his own FCA regulated platform Kession Capital which acts as a regulatory hosting service and oversees clients who need to be regulated for investment management and arranging business in the UK. Kession has overseen several businesses from crowdfunding platforms to the Swiss Stock Exchange on their regulatory and compliance matters.

In 2015 the idea of Tokenise was conceived to give investors access to digital securities and alternative asset classes, with the primary and secondary market functionality for the sector facilitated through DigiClear the first Central Securities Digital (CSD) for digital assets.

Since mid 2018 Kession has been working with the regulator in Barbados and has received a Self-Regulatory Organisation license to create a fully regulated dedicated tokenised stock exchange. Since then he has formed the Tokenise Group, which consist of an FCA (UK) licensed broker dealer, a Caribbean stock exchange and broker dealer, a CSD, as well as a Canadian and Gibraltar based holding company structure and has won third place in the regulatory sandbox challenge for Mexico.

The vision is to create a financially inclusive regulated multi-jurisdictional platform with a unified global single order book, to enable the fan-based ecosystem to buy into alternative assets that previously were unattainable. With additional licenses being sought in several jurisdictions around the world.

Mike is regularly asked to attend tokenised security discussions, with regulators, governments and exchanges to present on the activities within the market place.