The new Chief Executive Officer of Prasos Ltd will be Heidi Hurskainen with a strong background in banking and finance technology. The current CEO Henry Brade will become Executive Vice President and focus on his role as chairman of the board.
Henry Brade, a founding member of Prasos Ltd, has been CEO of the company since the very beginning. The growth strategy of the company has evolved along the years, and the board felt it was the right time to make changes to the highest operative management. The new chosen CEO Heidi Hurskainen has a strong background in the banking sector and has been the company’s commercial director since 2016 before joining the board of Prasos in 2018.
“I’ve been the company’s CEO and chairman of the board since the beginning and invested fully in the development of Prasos for the past 7 years. During our last accounting period we reached a record of 4.7 million euros and achieved a rather positive result. The past accounting period has been challenging due to the cyclic nature of our sector, but we believe in continued positive development and our growth strategy is stronger than ever before. It is good for the company to separate the roles of chairman of the board and CEO, and Hurskainen is the right person to be CEO. With this change I can focus more on my work on the board,” says Brade.
Cryptocurrencies and the banking sector approach each other
The European Union’s fifth anti-money laundering directive (AMLD 5) will take effect in Finland by January 2020 at the latest, and will also apply to European cryptocurrency service providers. As a result of the new regulation, services of the branch will, among other things, have to implement stricter KYC and AML processes as well as register their activity to a local authority. In Finland the overseeing authority will most likely be the Financial Supervisory Authority. Prasos has actively updated its KYC and AML practices for the past year to in compliance with the new directive.
Prasos aims to strongly develop and expand its services and is currently seeking permission to become a licensed payment institution. As a payment institution Prasos can provide new forms of payment services, which will likely improve the company’s competitive position in the future.
“The competitive situation evolves really fast and also provides us a lot of opportunities. We can already now provide our Coinmotion platform as a service for other financial operators and in the future we will invest even more to develop additional services for investors,” Hurskainen states.
The whole financial sector is at a turning point, in which finance technology companies are entering the domain of traditional banks. Thanks to their will for innovation these companies have also turned their eyes toward cryptocurrencies and Europe already now has financial operators providing the opportunity to exchange cryptocurrencies.
“I’ve been developing Prasos for nearly three years and the following years will require a lot of leaps both in terms of developing our business and scaling as well as conquering new markets. I believe my experience and comprehensive understanding of both the cryptocurrency sector as well as the fintech and banking world will help us find the next stage,” Hurskainen adds.
Heidi Hurskainen:
- Commercial director of Prasos Ltd since April 2016. She is also a member of the board as well as the strategy work group and management board.
- Vice chairman of the cryptocurrency association Konsensus ry.
- Advisor on the Fin-tech.es platform.
- Over 10 years of experience at the banks Banco Sabadell and Caja Mediterraneo with work related to investment planning.
Additional information: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hhurskainen
Prasos briefly
The business of Prasos Ltd is focused on exchanging and managing cryptocurrency assets. Over 250 million euros worth of cryptocurrencies have been exchanged through Prasos. The company was founded in Jyväskylä in 2012 and the current team is comprised of 20 experts of the field. In Europe Prasos has over 80 000 customers and its main services are: Coinmotion.com, Bittiraha.fi and Denarium.com.
