BlockFi appoints Yuri Mushkin as Chief Risk Officer

Former McKinsey and Goldman Sachs executive to play pivotal role in expanding firm’s cross-market risk management strategy

BlockFi, a financial services company dedicated to building a bridge between cryptocurrencies and traditional financial and wealth management products, today announced the appointment of Yuri Mushkin as Chief Risk Officer.

Mushkin will oversee the firm’s enterprise risk management strategy and operations, encompassing its fast-growing institutional and retail businesses. As BlockFi expands its trading, lending, custody, and asset management functions, he will be tasked with ensuring that the company’s risk framework continues to meet the rigorous standards of institutions and regulators.  

Mushkin brings over 20 years of capital markets experience across the buy-side and sell-side, where he focused on enterprise risk, portfolio management and analytics. Mushkin joins BlockFi from Beneficient Group, a private asset custodian and liquidity provider, where he served as Chief Risk Officer responsible for developing the central risk and data platform, harnessing new technologies and reporting financial and non-financial risk to the Board of Directors.

Prior to Beneficient, he was co-head of the McKinsey & Company Traded Risk service line, where he worked with the firm’s largest financial clients to solve regulatory and business-driven challenges across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Previous to McKinsey, Mushkin spent 14 years in Goldman Sachs, where he held several leadership roles globally across the Securities division, Electronic trading, and Firmwide risk.

With the appointment, BlockFi executive and former CRO Rene Van Kesteren will focus solely on his work as General Manager of Institutional Services, a role he concurrently held while building the company’s risk management framework from inception. 

“BlockFi strives to be a market leader in terms of our product suite and also risk management sophistication, as evidenced by our track record of lending in the sector throughout market cycles,” said Zac Prince, CEO and co-founder of BlockFi. “We’re excited to have Yuri join our leadership team, bringing extensive capital markets risk management expertise that will support our accelerated growth and the broader crypto markets’ maturation.”

“I’m thrilled to join BlockFi at this exciting stage of the company’s development to help Zac, Flori, and the rest of the leadership team innovate by building best-in-class risk infrastructure and operational resilience which serves our clients, investors, the broader industry and regulatory stakeholders,” said Mushkin.

Mushkin is based in Dallas and holds a BA in Finance and International Business from New York University and an MSc in Organizational Psychology from the London School of Economics. He is CFA Charterholder and contributor to CFA Institute initiatives.

Related News