Cowen Digital taps London lead, charging ahead amid crypto winter, mass layoffs

Cowen Digital hired a new lead for its European and Asian operations as the firm sticks to its ambitious digital asset plans and takes advantage of crypto winter to scoop up talent.

Taylor Cable, former COO and head of institutional client trading at BCAM (Blockchain.com Asset Management) who previously worked at Moore Capital Management, joins as managing director, Cowen Digital Europe. Cable,  based in London, will lead Cowen Digital’s European and Asian activities.

The digital arm of Cowen Inc. was launched in March with plans to expand to more than 100 people in its mission to allow institutional clients to secure, access and leverage cryptocurrencies in their portfolios. The unit has hired about 10 crypto natives and plans to forge ahead despite the industry-wide fallout from the recent collapse of FTX.

“Our game plan is the same: Provide institutional access to markets,” Drew Forman, head of Cowen Digital, said in an interview. “We’re still having conversations daily with entire teams at these massive asset managers about being ready to trade when they want to allocate. Those mandates are ones firms like us will win going forward.”

The firm has a “renewed” focus on risk management amid the fallout from the industry bankruptcies and layoffs, which Forman says have been a boon for Cowen Digital.

“We’re continuing to add where we can find talent and expand our products,” Forman said. “We never over-hired and the team is right-sized and we want to continue to be adding exceptional people like Taylor, the likes of which potentially wouldn’t have been in our reach if bitcoin continued rallying through $60,000.”

Recent layoffs have been made at crypto exchange Bitso, Argentina's Lemon and Australia's Swyftx.

And while the crypto industry find itself in a rough patch, Forman is confident good will come of it. 

“Competitively, we will reemerge from this with better business practices, hopefully with a clearer regulatory landscape and fewer bad actors and what will come out of it is an infrastructure that the huge trillion-dollar asset managers can invest in,” Forman said.