Matthew Van Niekerk

In 2016 after several years of analysis and experimentation with blockchain technologies in financial services and capital markets, I cofounded SettleMint with one objective: to simplify the blockchain transformation journey for enterprises. When you believe in the benefits that the technology will bring to organisations and to society as a whole, there is an accompanying moral obligation to accelerate the adoption of the technology and that is what we do at SettleMint. Our chain and infrastructure agnostic blockchain transformation platform provides the absolute shortest path between a use case concept and the realisation of the business case underpinning it. Prior to SettleMint, I moved to Belgium in 2006 where I completed my MBA then went to work at KBC. First as an internal management and operations consultant, later as the COO of the Belgian Consumer Finance business and finally as the Head of Platform Innovation at KBC Securities where I was responsible for the technical side of the online retail brokerage platform ‘Bolero’ and the equity crowdfunding platform ‘Bolero Crowdfunding’. A Canadian by origin and an Economist (Western) and MBA (Vlerick) by education, I spent the first 7 years of my international career in Tokyo, working in FX brokerage and where I launched two online retailing companies.