Eight Questions: Jennifer Liu, Head of Lending
Leslie Ankney, Communications Lead
Welcome to Eight Questions, where we profile individual members of the Anchorage Digital team, diving into their career paths, what brought them to crypto, and what makes them tick. Why eight? Because it’s the number of decimal places a bitcoin can be divided into. It’s also the last single digit number in a Fibonacci Sequence, and we like that.
Next in our series, meet Jennifer Liu, who leads the Anchorage Digital Finance business line. Jennifer’s been with Anchorage for the last year and has played a tremendous role in shaping lending and borrowing through Anchorage Financing. Prior to Anchorage, Jennifer worked in both traditional finance and technology companies including Morgan Stanley, Alibaba, and crypto exchange, Ledger Holdings. Jennifer maintains a balanced life of family scooter rides through the sidewalks of Puerto Rico when she’s not building at Anchorage. Learn more about her vision for Anchorage Financing, working remotely, and more below.
- What was your experience with crypto before joining the team?
I was first interested in Bitcoin as a personal investment. Then, seeing the crypto industry grow as this intersection of finance and technology, I decided it’d be the perfect place to blend my finance skillset with my interest in building products. Coming to crypto was perfect, I was always in the finance world and could explore tech developments in the same role at Anchorage Digital.
2. You recently moved to Puerto Rico from New York. What have been some of the interesting things you’ve discovered about yourself in the process?
Before COVID-19, my family and I lived in Manhattan. We had a whole life built around New York City, where the first question you usually hear upon meeting someone is “What do you do?”. When the pandemic hit, we retreated to NJ with family and ended up staying for far longer than we thought as the summer weeks turned into a full year.
Spending that unexpected time really re-centered me on what’s important. My kids are two and three, so they’re changing and learning every day. I wanted to live in a place where we could explore near the beach, ride scooters together, and spend lots of time outdoors in general (I love to play tennis!) We did some research and moved to Puerto Rico, sight unseen. It was a huge leap of faith but it’s paid off. Life is really different here, and working remotely helps me capture more of these special moments seeing my kids between meetings. I bring my kids to the park in a golf cart every day and when someone new meets me, they ask about my hobbies or my family. It’s also pretty cool that crypto is very normal here, everyone knows about it or has a connection to it. You don’t get big reactions when you say you work in crypto here.
3. You’ve worked on many sides of innovation as a CFO and CFA, what’s a lesson or two you’ve learned from a past role that informs your work at Anchorage Digital today?
One big lesson: learning from parallel experiences will help you succeed. When I was investing in equities, I learned the process of choosing stocks and pitching them to PMs. This transfers to what we do on a daily basis with Anchorage Financing. in a similar process, we select lenders and borrowers and present loan opportunities to our risk committee. Similarly, at my prior crypto clearinghouse role, the company was federally regulated under the CFTC, so as CFO, I had experiences meeting rigorous federal reporting, controls, and auditing standards. I use this a lot designing integrity in lending (which is offered through an affiliate of Anchorage Digital Bank) and see this same commitment between Anchorage Digital Bank and the OCC for our charter.
4. Can you give us a basic overview of crypto lending and how it works?
Crypto-backed lending allows long-term holders to put their cash or digital assets to work by loaning it to others that would like to leverage it for working capital purposes or for use in trading. This lending is mutually beneficial to both borrowers and lenders as it generates yield for the lender, and liquidity for the borrower. Anchorage Digital Financing gives both lenders and borrowers a safe and secure solution with the kind of trust in collateral they need.
5. What’s been interesting about setting up a crypto lending program for institutions at Anchorage? What makes the Anchorage approach different?
We’re one of the few lending institutions to do loans in a way that funds never have to leave security of the Anchorage platform. We always had the building blocks to do lending but had to put it together. We had the place to put the collateral, had the liquidation through brokerage, had insights into how we’d build loan monitoring from our work with Silvergate, but we needed to source the loans and borrowers after that. I really had to stitch the pieces together. It’s really interesting that from the very beginning the founders had a vision that financing would be one of our services. It was a matter of timing and execution.
6. What’s it been like launching our Financing business?
It’s really hard to get something from zero to one. After onboarding at Anchorage last year, I took on the challenge of launching a whole new business line remotely. I remember the first loan we did getting it out the door and working with people I’ve never met before. Now, it’s a lot easier.
When you’re just trying to get the pieces together, we had to build our confidence and process internally, and I had to do much of this remotely. In fact, we launched Anchorage Digital Financing as our first business line totally built remotely. Getting our first loan out the door was the hardest, because we wanted strong processes before starting, doing it correctly from the beginning. After the first three, it was clear this is a business line where Anchorage could be an industry leader. Now it’s at the next stage of scaling the business.
7. What’s it like working across the distributed, remote first Anchorage team?
When I first joined, Anchorage was transitioning from being a close-knit physical office in San Francisco to a remote first team. Getting to know people is different because you can’t rely on physical cues, you can’t just bump into people so I’m still figuring out the best ways to meet with colleagues remotely. I think all of us are figuring out how to have that personal connection time in our meetings, and what meetings should be recurring versus one-off.
8. Where do you go to learn more about your line of work? What kind of professional development is important to you?
Lending is something a lot of traditional financial companies do, so I learn what I can from them to apply to our business. I have a lot of relationships with traditional finance companies from my investment days. Reaching out to these contacts at traditional companies doing similar work with lending had helped immensely in taking their learnings to building our Financing business.
Interested in shaping the future of crypto finance with Jennifer? Anchorage Digital is hiring for a variety of roles. Check our job opportunities here.
Disclaimer: Holdings of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets are speculative and involve a substantial degree of risk, including the risk of complete loss. There can be no assurance that any cryptocurrency, token, coin, or other crypto asset will be viable, liquid, or solvent. Nothing in this communication is intended to imply that any asset held in custody by Anchorage is low-risk or risk-free. Digital assets held in custody are not guaranteed by Anchorage Digital Bank National Association and are not FDIC-insured.
