Former Google and PayPal Executive Joins Bakkt

By Rishma Banerjee

Mike Blandina, a former Paypal and Google executive, has joined Bakkt as their Chief Product Officer. This was revealed by Kelly Loeffler, the CEO at the company which focuses on digital assets and was launched by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the world’s largest stock exchange with a market cap of over $30 trillion.This was announced on Bakkt’s official Medium account on April 11th. The announcement reads,
“the most important aspects of building Bakkt [aren’t] technological.” She believes that having qualified personnel onboard will help the company build innovative products “from the ground up.”
It has also been noted by the company that Blandina who has more than 25 years of experience in payments across products,  engineering, strategy and operations will be mainly concerning himself with leading  the firm’s “efforts to converge a trusted ecosystem for digital assets with payments use cases.”
Before this stint at Bakkt, Blandina was responsible for “leading product and engineering” at OneMarket. Before taking on a senior management role at OneMarket, Blandina served as Head of Payments and Credit Engineering at PayPal and also as Director of Engineering for Google Wallet at Google. It can be noted that he began working at Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company after the search engine giant acquired TxVia, a venture capital funded FinTech firm where he served as COO and also as a senior board member.

Blandina has also served as the CTO at Blackhawk Network, a leading gift card and digital payment solutions provider. Blandina also served as founder of “several successful tech startups,” Loeffler wrote.

Loeffler remarked:

As [Bakkt] works through regulatory approvals, [it’s] mindful that the infrastructure we are building has the potential to create more opportunities for digital assets to grow in relevance and trust — by being more secure, investible and useful.

Rishma Banerjee

Rishma is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and has a special place in her life for sifting through all sorts of random trivia, thank you very much.

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