Dive Brief:

• Finance veteran Steve Bisgay will serve as CFO for fintech Clear Street effective immediately, succeeding current finance chief Jacob Asbury among a suite of sweeping leadership changes, the company announced Tuesday.  
• Bisgay will take the company’s top financial seat as it appoints two other new executives, tapping Ursula Clay to serve as chief compliance officer and Brent Posner to serve as chief operating officer, Clear Street Futures, the company said Tuesday. Asbury, who has served as Clear Street’s CFO for two years, will stay on in a consulting capacity, as well as aid with the transition.
• Bisgay, among his top goals, aims to achieve "a very good understanding and really have a good assessment of what that ideal capital model is for the organization to support the growth overall,” he said in an interview with CFO Dive.

Dive Insight:

Founded in 2018, the New-York based fintech — which aims to replace legacy infrastructure for capital markets, offering a cloud-native clearing and custody system — has had an impressive growth story over the past few years.

Bisgay is taking the company’s financial reins after Clear Street received a $270 million investment from Prysm Capital in April. The investment represented the second installment of a $435 million Series B funding round which values the company at $2 billion.

As well as examining the company’s capital base and getting to know the heads of the company’s businesses and the challenges they are facing, Bisgay’s first steps as finance chief will also include conducting an organizational assessment of finance to best understand the processes, underlying technology and depth of resources to ensure the team is built for scale and for the growth that Clear Street has seen in the past.

“I want to make sure that we have a very effective, well tooled financial organization to support that as well,” he said. At the moment, Clear Street has more than 400 employees, and the finance team is appropriately sized for that figure, he said.  

Alongside the company’s most recent funding round, Clear Street has also taken steps to build out its leadership teams, both moves which make it clear that expansion both from a product and geographic perspective are certainly “on the growth plan” for the company — which is naturally “why a CFO has to think about capital adequacy and the ability to support the growth of that,” Bisgay said.

That requires working with other members of the executive team to figure out what the capital base will need to look like, which could be daunting at a company whose growth has included rapid-fire expansion of its leadership team. As well as its new CFO, chief operating officer and CCO appointments, Clear Street built out both its sales and engineering teams with new senior hires in 2022. In June, the company announced that Bank of America alum Kevin McCarthy was tapped to serve as its chief administrative officer and head of clearing.

While many entrants to the team are new, “there are a lot of similarities in terms of our style,” Bisgay said of Clear Street’s hiring.

“We may come from different companies. We may have worn different jerseys, we may have competed against each other various times in our career. But there's this sort of common link of collaboration, but most importantly of excitement, which occurs from being part of something that is new and different.”

Clear Street’s cloud-native platform is a unique offering in the capital markets space, where Wall Street is relying on historic, mainframe based technology — mainframes which still rely on increasingly antiquated coding languages like COBOL.  

“That has been sufficient, but unfortunately it leads to complexities that leads to higher risk,” he said of the technology. “And we're in a situation where we have effectively, in many respects, simplified things, made things more efficient.”

Before joining ClearStreet, Bisgay logged an eight-year tenure as CFO and executive managing director for global financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald. He has also held CFO roles for BGC Partners, KCG Holdings and Knight Capital Group, and served as a senior manager at Big Four accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, according to his LinkedIn profile.  

Clay is joining as the prime broker’s compliance chief following a stint as managing director and CCO at Nearwater Capital. She also served in senior positions for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and banks Morgan Stanley and Barclays. Posner, meanwhile, most recently served as SVP and COO for ED&F Man Capital Markets.