Richard Baker

CEO of Tokenovate

Born to Build

Richard Baker hails from Southern Ireland, where he fondly remembers his innocent, outdoor life as one of five children, and the water and mountains of Cork County. As a kid, he learned from his Royal Marine father the importance of exploration, sailing, and building things. He went to a small school where he learned to live with his heart on his sleeve, leave his ego at the door, and help others. His father was also a builder, instilling the entrepreneurial spirit in Richard, who picked up electronics early, reminiscing about his collection of Valve Radios, experimenting with Morse Code and Long Wave radios, and even installing a huge antenna in his family’s garden. He found his curious heart drawn to communications.

At 15, his parents decided to seek better economic opportunities in England, and after college, he attended the Mercantile Navy Training School to become a Radio Officer focused on Electronics and Communications Engineering. After school, his first corporate job was in Telecommunications with Nortel Networks.

The Principles of Standards

At Nortel, a prominent communications provider with 70% market share at the time and 200,000 employees, Richard learned the skills to lead a professional digital transformation as the industry shifted from copper-pair-based telephony to Optical technologies for his enterprise clients. This enterprise experience took him to the London Business School, where he learned that many people “overestimate technology and underestimate the change journey.” At Nortel, he became Vice-President of the Cable & Wireless Global Account. After Nortel, Richard moved to Cable & Wireless as Head of Product for the Global Voice Business, especially overseeing the transition from digital to Voice over IP. He laughs and says, “Look, we are talking now over the very technologies we built all that time ago for this conversation right now.”

In the mid-2000s, with the rise of TCP/IP networks and the growth of content on them, Richard moved to Real Networks to focus on developing technologies for streaming video and audio. The most important lesson he drew from these telecommunication experiences, he tells me, is “the importance of a principled approach to industry standards.” He explains that every organisation moves at a different pace in adopting new technologies, but that the standards for operations must remain the same across the industry.

In 2009, he became a consultant in Digital Technology for an Inter-Dealer Broker Voice OTC Commodities Swaps business, where he learned the intricacies of Dodd-Frank and MiFID 1 (and later 2). He focused on enabling the business’s capabilities for trade matching, trade capture, and early straight-through processing (STP). This experience opened an opportunity in 2010 to build a modern exchange.

A Convergence of Technologies

Cleartrade Exchange was a dry bulk capacity commodities exchange with its own Central Order Limit Book, regulated Futures Market in Singapore, and a straight-through-processor for LCH, NORQ (A division of NASDAQ), CME, and Deutsche Börse Group (DBG) with a focus on Iron, Coal, Fertilizer, and bunker fuel. In 2016, the executive team led a successful exit to DBG’s European Energy Exchange AG (EEX), EEX’s first acquisition, to accelerate its growth beyond Germany into the Asian and US markets. Looking back at the experience, Richard tells me that the foundations he learned in Digital Transformations during his telecommunications days laid the perfect foundation for his successful management of converging technologies in a new industry.

In 2017, after the successful exit, Richard spent time consulting and learning about Blockchain – he helped create a public markets platform that mines Bitcoin in Canada and North America, and built a utility network from the operation.

The Birth of Tokenovate

In 2021, Richard was reconnected with a good friend, Gerard Banaszkiewicz, co-founder of Tokenovate. Together, they spent six months brainstorming a business with 3 ideas coming to the front: 1) An Internet of Things (IoT) business, 2) A Smart Contract Capital Markets Business, and 3) An Irish Sports Bar in Cambridge (because there was a hole in the market). They ended up going with the second idea, “Tokenising (legal & economic) Novation,” which gave rise to Tokenovate. The idea centred on leveraging foundational legal market standards, coupled with blockchain technology, cloud computing, and programmable workflows, to smooth collateral mobility. Richard smiles and says, “To solve key issues in collateral plumbing, it’s helpful to view derivatives as a bundle of legal rights, and Tokenovate is the Modern-day orchestration platform for those property rights and pledges.”

With the advent of Cloud, LLMs, and Blockchain, the Middle and Back Office operations can be reimagined, and Richard’s goal is to “inspire and build a new way of managing securities lifecycles.” Richard intends to do this through the lessons learned throughout his life and career: 1) Be a builder, 2) The Principled approach of Standards, and 3) Leverage a convergence of Technologies. As a leader, Richard continues to prioritize building first, leaving his ego at the door, and helping people reach their full potential.

Tokenovate is emerging as a leader in Capital Markets Smart Contract solutions, especially in the Repo and Securities Finance business, collaborating with industry standard providers such as ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) and receiving praise from many industry veterans.