As January comes to an end, R3, one of the leading providers of distributed ledger technology, has carried out a reorganization of its internal management structure. This led to the departure of two executives of the management team. The two executives who have stepped down are Lauren Carroll, the chief administrative officer and Brian McNulty, the managing director of R3’s head of global services. This was according to what the remaining numbers of the management team said to R3 employees on Friday during a town hall meeting.
R3 Restructures Its Internal Management Team
R3 Restructures Its Internal Management Team
According to a spokesperson from the consortium, R3 will launch an expansive hiring project in 2019. However, no details about departure of individual members of staff were disclosed. Carroll and McNulty, refused to make any comments about the reason for their departure.
Before he became a top executive at R3, Carroll was the in-house counsel at ICAP. In 2016, McNulty joined the consortium during a mass onboarding of member banks. Before this time, he founded Post Trade Distributed Ledger Group. This is a strong rival to R3 as it provides the same services and has about 40 members including State Street Bank, CME Group and the London Stock Exchange.
The reorganization will see Todd McDonald in charge of a new design team that will combine all R3’s marketing efforts and products. This is according to the memo that was sent to the company’s employees by David Rutter after the town hall meeting. Before now, engineering was in the same division as product management and this division was headed by Richard Gendal Brown. Both divisions will now stand separately now.
Many other changes were made to the structure of the organization. The office of the general counsel was merged with the office of public relations and external affairs. James Carlyle, the Chief engineer of R3 will now be in charge of the new production team that will be fully dedicated to supporting the technological development of R3.
Zack Kavanaugh, the chief of staff will also become in charge of human and business resources. Paul Harris is now in charge of the combined corporate development and finance team. Right now, there is no chief revenue officer but the consortium is looking forward to appointing someone to lead the sales team before the end of January. The position has been vacant since Scott Grayson departed earlier in September. Grayson left R3 to join AlphaPoint, a blockchain service firm.
In June 2018, media outlets reported that R3 was running out of funds. This was primarily due to the bear market that affected the entire industry last year.
Towards the end of the year, a legal dispute between R3 and Ripple that had to do with the purchase of XRP tokens worth five billion was settled. R3 didn’t make any comments at the time. Hopefully, the reorganization will be accompanied by a change in strategy that will bring the consortium closer to its goal and increase its members.
Do you think the departure of both executives was caused by an internal dispute among members of the management team?
Max writes about blockchain projects and regulation with a special focus on United States and China. He joined Smarterum after years of writing for various media outlets.
