Douglas Borthwick is the Chief Business Officer of INX. From 2012 through September 2018, Mr. Borthwick founded and built the Chapdelaine FX electronic and voice trading business for inter-dealer broker TP-ICAP. From 1996 through 2005, Mr. Borthwick worked with Morgan Stanley in a variety of capacities, including managing foreign exchange derivatives trading groups in New York and London, with a special focus on emerging markets. From 2005 to 2006, he was the head of Merrill Lynch’s strategic trading desk, and from 2006 to 2009, he was the head of Standard Chartered’s Latin American FX trading unit.
Mr. Borthwick supervised trading and research sectors for Faros Trading, a startup foreign exchange agency that was ultimately acquired to FXCM in 2013. Mr. Borthwick graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a bachelor’s degree in economics and Yale University’s School of Management with an MBA.
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The future of Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, NFTs with Douglas Borthwick
Brett:
I’m excited about our next guest. We’re gonna be talking about the future of Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and NFT’s. He’s a repeat guest and he’s out of the great state of New York. He’s focused on helping people understand the future of all things cryptocurrency, all things regulation, and he is the Chief Business Officer for a group called INX. INX is a digital company and operates a cryptocurrency trading platform transfer agent, digital asset broker-dealer, and ATS in combination with an interdealer broker. They serve institutional retail clients across all digital assets. Please welcome to the show with me, Douglas Borthwick. Douglas, how are you doing today?
Douglas:
I’m good. Thank you very much for having me.
Brett:
Absolutely. Great to have you back on the show. For our listeners, who maybe didn’t see the previous show, which came out about a month ago, you can go to YouTube, search Capital Gains Tax Solutions, and Douglas Borthwick and the show will come up. But for those who are just getting to know you, would you give just a brief background on who you are, and then we’ll dive right into the topic.
Douglas:
Sure, thanks, Brett. I’m Douglas Borthwick born in Scotland came to America a long time ago, went to undergrad and business school here. I did 10 years at Morgan Stanley, in foreign exchange derivatives ran a proprietary trading desk at Merrill Lynch, Standard Charter on the Latin America trading desk, and then went to a company called TP-Icap on interdealer broker where I built a foreign exchange trading system. Since then, I’ve been with INX for about two and a half years now and the Chief Business Officer and we’re very involved in the digital space and happy to answer all the questions you got for me today, Brett.
Brett:
Fantastic. We want to focus a little on the regulation that’s happening as well. It’s really unique with Douglas, their company, INX, which you can find by going to inx.co was the first to get an IPO for the blockchain and maybe explain a little bit of that, Douglas. Then, let’s start talking about a little bit of some of the headwinds, potentially for the regulation that’s coming to Bitcoin and Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies.
Douglas:
An IPO on the blockchain means that we didn’t do an IPO the traditional way, which is, you go out there in the legacy space, you do an IPO, you raise capital, and your list on a traditional exchange. What we did was we raised money like an ICO and we opened up a website, raised money from 7,250 investors in 74 countries. The average age was 42 years old, we ended up raising around $85 million. To get there, we had to put a prospectus together to talk about IPO and on the blockchain that took us 950 days working with the SEC, a lot of questions back and forth in order to do that, but we ended up finishing it, getting it done. Now, we’re helping other companies do that and go through the process. Now you want to talk about regulation? I’d love to. I think we do with regulators on the state level through empty money transmitter licenses. Then because of our broker-dealer, we deal with FINRA and the SEC, and with their interdealer broker, we deal with the NFA as well as a registered inter introducing broker. So I’ve got lots of different ways that I can help you and discuss with you ask away.
Brett:
Let’s talk about the one that’s like most pressing before the show. You’re mentioning a couple of things that you wanted to touch on. What do investors, business professionals, who help high net worth clients, need to know about? What’s the current reality of what’s happening in the cryptocurrency space in the investment space for all things blockchain?
Douglas:
Well, I think that your listeners probably and then folks watching probably understand what a Swiss Bank Account is. Swiss Bank Account is a fan of fell out of favor a couple of years ago, maybe 10 years ago, when the US realized there was a lot of wealth being held in Swiss Bank Accounts. That wasn’t okay, because it was wealth that wasn’t being taxed correctly. Now, the US government now, I think looks at electronic wallets in a similar type note, in that there are folks with a lot of Bitcoin, and they’re trading offshore or even onshore. Yet the government has no idea how much wealth is in these or if there are any capital gains tax to be allocated. So, they want to find a way whereby they can sort of regulate that. They can see what’s in your wallet, how much are you making, and what’s your wealth. One way to do that is to come up with regulations. Obviously, President Biden’s working on an executive order. But also the SEC is working on this, Treasury’s working on this, everyone’s trying to figure out a landscape for regulation. The net of it, I think for the individual investor is, if you have an electronic wallet, or you’re trading there to a regulated exchange in the US, you probably have nothing to worry about. But if you’re trading offshore, and the government doesn’t know about it, then there’s regulation probably coming down the line regulation being or maybe if you have an electronic wallet, you hold Bitcoin, and maybe you have to register it somewhere and go through a whitelisting process with a registered broker-dealer or someone like that in the United States. I think that that was where things are going in that today, it’s a bit of wild west, folks are dealing on uni swap, or they’re dealing offshore with offshore exchanges. I think the US wants to bring it inside the US make it a much more stable or regulated environment. By doing that, it means that the institutions can start getting involved. Now some people are going to turn around and say, well, that’s not okay. I like my privacy. I think for the US government, your privacy is probably a secondary issue. What’s more important for them, is allowing institutions to do defy as well, or allowing institutions to come in and trade and exchanges and feel like they know who’s on the other side that they’ve gone through some sort of money laundering or KYC procedure. That’s where the US government looks like it’s moving. Whether it’s going to become an edict from the SEC or something that’s coming from the executive desk. I think that it’s something that we all have to get used to. But it means that the bigger players are going to start getting involved.
Brett:
Excellent. Inx.co as the first IPO, what are the other things that you’re doing to try to make it as transparent and as accessible to invest and to cooperate? Because you’re right, we’ve got to get all the parties playing well together. We want to make sure you use the analogy that you want to bring the regulators in the people along in the ride, not in the rearview mirror catching up. So walk us through, what next is doing and then how people can get involved or invest or be a part of it?
Douglas:
Well, we went a long way about this a lot of folks did ICOs raising capital, they raised $25 billion in 2017, we thought that that was maybe being done in an illegal manner when you raise money from the general public, you really have to work with the SEC.so that long road took us around three years. But in doing so we created a path for folks to be able to go public on the blockchain. That means that when you hold security, you actually hold it yourself in a meta mask, wallet, or in your own electronic wallet. Every single trade you do shows up on the blockchain, you can go to ether scan.io, and see all the trades that are happening in the next token today. You’re right, our ticker symbol, where we prove two things were listed our equities listed on the Neo exchange in Canada, under INXD. Then our security token that gives the holders the rights to 40% of our net operating cash flow and a cumulative basis is listed on the INF Securities Exchange. Sorry, ATS. Now, what do we do? Well, every single person that comes to our doors, whether to trade cryptocurrency or our securities, they have to go through a KYC and AML process. That means that we need to know who they are. That’s asking for a driver’s license. Id the same way as if you sign up for E-trade, or you sign up at Morgan Stanley, when you go through a broker-dealer, you got to go through certain tracking certain processes where you have to show them who you are, and whether you have assets behind you. We have to ask you questions about what’s your investing theses are you out there too, are you a risk-taker? Are you not a risk-taker, you got to make sure that you’re offering products to people that they understand that they’re buying. I think there are a lot of exchanges around the world in the cryptocurrency space that doesn’t ask a lot of these questions that just want to get the volumes in, they want people trading. That’s obviously not something that works in a regulated umbrella. What INX is doing is taking that regulatory umbrella that’s offered in the United States and making it available for the cryptocurrency side, but also for the security side, which we think is very important.
Brett:
I think that’s the most important because the biggest thing with cryptocurrency, I think for those especially that are high net worth and are looking at this either for the first time or as a way to diversify their portfolios from all-time highs in the stock market, real estate market and get in seeing this as a more traditional asset class. They want to know that security is there, So you guys are offering in your background, Morgan Stanley and everything else. High-level security or how are you doing that? What are the steps that you’re taking? How does that differentiate from some of the other players that are out there now?
Douglas:
Well, there are many different ways to look at security when you’re in the crypto space, one would be the security of someone’s wallets. The other one would be the security of your actual security. If you buy a regular ERC 20 token or you buy a utility token, and it’s sitting in your electronic wallet, well, you could lose your wallet, you lose your, your, your seed phrase for that, and you’ve lost it forever, or someone could hack the wallet and they could take what’s in your wallet and make it there’s that we came up with a standard called the ERC 1404 standard for our security token, and we’re going to start expanding that into a lot of different issuers. What happens then is if you lose your wallet, or you lose the keys to your wallet, that’s not a problem, we can revoke that lost wallet and reissue it to a new one. So you don’t have to go walking through a landfill anymore, trying to find the wallet that you lost. Or if you have a boating accident, you don’t have to worry about losing your securities, you can’t lose your 401k in a boating accident. So that’s one thing that we’ve done. Another is with an ERC 1404 token. It’s built-in such a way that the only way if someone wants to move it from one wallet to another, it actually looks into the blockchain sees if the wallet that it’s moving to is whitelisted. If it’s not, it refuses to move. That’s kind of important because I think a lot of people get their wallets hacked. Someone will take out the Ethereum from that or they’ll take out the USDC. But the INX token will remain there because it will refuse to move unless it moves to the whitelisted wallet. Now when it moves, so whitelisted wallet, well, good news, because then it’s moved to a wallet that we know the owner of and will be able to help you if you find that there were some issues. So we’re sort of bringing, I guess, security, not just to the space in terms of who you’re trading with, or at least we know who you’re trading with, but also in the fact that we’re making securities such that they’re not like Bitcoin. They’re not like Ethereum, and you could lose them because you lost your wallet. Instead, we’re making it such that they can be revoked and reissued. So hey, good news, you’re not losing your 401k.
Brett:
So let me see if I caught that. Because I think I think I’m getting it now. So I think about the TSA PreCheck. I sat down, they did the thumbs and the driver’s license in the background and all the stuff that they did to finally precheck is a couple of years ago, I don’t remember all the process. But the point is, now I can walk through the airport, knowing that I can basically get through pretty quickly and not do certain other things. So what you guys are doing is making sure that if (a) funds are being sent out that those have been whitelisted, or maybe like a TSA PreCheck. So that be if (b) someone is hacked or something does happen, or they’re trying to send it off to someone that is not traceable, in a sense, where it’s lost forever. Am I following right? Anything I missed there?
Douglas:
I think you’re falling right I mean, let’s give an example of defy and defies the title about you to know what we’re talking about here. In Defy, you’ve got individuals all around the world trading with each other, they don’t know who their Counterparty is, but they’re doing trades amongst each other. Now, that works for individuals offshore. But in the United States, if someone like Blackrock wants to get into define start trading with defy, they can’t because they need to know who they’re trading with on the other side, they need to make sure it’s not money laundered money. Now, let’s say you create a fence around that. Everyone that goes into that defy area has gone through some sort of KYC and AML.so now they’re all known parties, and they’re all known to be good parties or cleaning parties, I guess would be the regulatory view of it. Once that happens, then Blackrock can come in and start trading using defy-type products. Now, it already exists. If you go to Chase Bank, and you deposit your $100,000, and you get a quarter of a percent Chase banks lending that out of 15% to a credit card user. Now you don’t know who that credit card user is Chase banks taking the difference in the yields, but at the same time, you’re happy to do it, and you do it because well, it’s market but also it’s all under a regulatory standard. When you use a defy protocol, I offshore off the US, you don’t know who you’re trading with. There’s I guess it’s much less regulated, but also the big boys can’t get involved. So once you create a playing field where everyone’s gone through this sort of check to make sure that they’re, I guess, clean individuals, they’ve gone through the KYC a new your customer, they’ve gone through AML anti-money laundering. So we all know that they’re good parties, good counterparties then a lot more people can get involved in this that have a lot more money.
Brett:
Excellent. So let’s now shift a little bit and let’s talk about the future of Bitcoin. We saw values as high as almost 69,000 a coin and they dropped about 35,000 a coin. It’s been a swing in the last few months. Ethereum took a big hit. But yet there are lots of amazing entities that are still exploding. So what’s your overall take of the temperature of investing in cryptocurrency? Any thoughts on Ethereum 2.0 coming out anything like that?
Douglas:
Well, I’m not going to give you investment advice. I’m not licensed for that, but I can tell you is that the adoption of Bitcoin seems to be raising considerably. Take India, for example, India, pretty much went through a banning process for cryptocurrencies a couple of months ago, and then just two days ago, came out and said, You know what, we’re gonna make it legal. We’re going to tax it by x amount. Russia as well, a couple of days ago, everyone thought they were going to ban it. Now they’ve come turn around, they’re embracing it. So countries are putting a pause for only a very short time before they then turn around and say, You know what, this, isn’t it, we’re in this for the long haul. I mean, want our people to start investing in it. Now, when you add populations, the size of Indian populations, the size of Russia, in and you say, You know what, now you can start trading these products? Well, it means that adoption is going to start rising, JP Morgan came out today. I think they said that they can see Bitcoin go into 150,000. Now, they also then added another tweet saying, but not in the near term, maybe it’s overpriced around 44,000. Well, maybe they’re just saying that because they want to fill their own boots and then get to stack their own sacks. But the reality is I think that institutions, and I think populations and governments understand that Bitcoin is here to stay. So there’s Ethereum and so they need to start getting the regulations behind it to encourage people to be involved.
Brett:
Yeah, it makes sense. It’s curious how quickly things can change. When our entire country has a stance, it’s so challenging, or banning, like, no it’s gone, we’re good, all these things, all of a sudden, they’re flipping over. I also think of China when they cut and become more regulatory on it too. It seems like the trend I’ve heard, I’m still a novice of this, that it actually rises. So any thoughts on when regulatory comes in and tries to ban it or whatever, control it more than the that the value goes higher? Any thoughts on that? Because I’m still trying to figure that out. But it sounds, I’m wondering what you think about that?
Douglas:
If fidelity could come in and buy bitcoin right now, or Goldman Sachs could they wouldn’t be buying it in $10,000 increments, they’d be buying in billion-dollar increments. So the more that regulation comes in, the larger players start getting involved, well, the more you’re going to see price movement, I guess, to the top side, because they’re coming in much larger sizes. If you think of maybe the largest institutional player today, maybe it’s MicroStrategy and sailors coming in, and he keeps on buying the dip, or you look at El Salvador buying on the dip there’s some large institutions and sovereigns that are now beginning to buy in the dip, or certainly take an active role in it. Tesla’s balance sheet obviously has Bitcoin on it. The US government, I think, has three and a half billion dollars of Bitcoin on it, after they found out to to the bit FinEx sack. So no, there are plenty of governments that have large, large balances now. But still, the real money guys, the guys that end up pushing the market around, aren’t involved. But when they can get involved, and they can start buying for their customers, and start filling their bags, that’s when I think you’re gonna see absolutely tremendous momentum to the upside. Because there’s obviously, there’s a limited number of Bitcoin out there. As demand starts to rise in a very large level, then you’re gonna see prices higher if you think about 10 years ago, and the guy that was talking about Bitcoin was in his mother’s basement had 10 followers on Twitter, I was saying it’s going to 20,000. Everyone said, look, this guy’s a conspiracy theorist. But if you look at it today, you get the richest man in the world talking about how bitcoins going higher, JP Morgan coming out today, saying it’s gonna go higher. Today, it’s mainstream. When things go mainstream, people start adopting much, much faster. It’s like, if you make a chart of the cell phone, you look at a chart of the cell phone and adoption for the first 10 years, no one really cared about cell phones, then they came up with excuses. if I put a cell phone next year, I’ll get brain cancer. Now everyone’s going to sell. I think that the numbers are, there are three mobile devices for every person in the United States. So I guess the current iPads as well. But when adoption happens, and it happens, fast, things start moving very, very quickly.
Brett:
I couldn’t agree with you more. We’re, we’re trying to help people who want to exit those high gains. We’re seeing just a massive amount of people coming to us, especially now that it was a big boom in 2021. Then a big kind of pullback here the last couple of months. So people were trying to figure out ways, how do I sell high? How do I diversify? How do I defer capital gains tax? So we just did our first couple deals Ethereum and Bitcoin, mainly, both about 12 and a half million under management now, deferring millions of dollars of capital gains tax. We’re working on one right now that’s an NFT sale. It’s artwork, that’s a physical art, but also becoming, they’re making NFT. Tens of millions of dollars worth of value, and they’re looking to exit with us. But that’s typically the biggest frustration, Douglas is this capital gains tax for a lot of people who want to exit or how do they navigate that? So without giving up your US citizenship or moving to Puerto Rico. I’m curious, what strategies or thoughts have you explored to defer capital gains tax on the exit of crypto?
Douglas:
I’d say that the whales that I know don’t actually exit ever. So they stack then what they do is they stake. When you stake you actually still own it. But you lock it up for a period of time, and you get paid to pay to yield. There are a lot of different institutions that offer you yields on what you have. Now, you’d pay tax on the yield that you earned as a 1099 form that comes out for that. But don’t end up actually selling. So if you bought Bitcoin at $400, and now it’s trading there, what $44,000 today, rather than selling it and said, you stake it, and and I know this doesn’t help your business. But revenue, the only time you pay taxes is when you sell it. So if you don’t sell ever, instead, you get yield on it. Well, that’s always a good way to go about it. That’s what I see certainly base.
Brett:
Good point there which is staking and stacking. I’m curious about the staking part because I have heard this and this is cool. Then I’m gonna throw another idea at you to see what you think about this. But what happens if you stake let’s just say you have $10 million Ethereum or Bitcoin and you stake it, and the value of Bitcoin when you stake that was $68,000 a coin, and then it drops to $35,000 a coin? When are you subject to margin calls? Are you subject to yield changes? Like the scenario?
Douglas:
If I have $60,000 worth of bitcoin and I put it in and they’re paying me 6% the price of Bitcoin goes down to $30,000 and I’m still getting 6%, but I’m getting 6% on $30,000. The way that most of these staking firms work is you get paid out on a daily or a weekly or a monthly basis. So it’s always gonna be based upon what’s the dollar value that’s sitting there? Or they’ll pay you 6% of whatever you put down in Bitcoin, but you’re getting paid in Bitcoin? So regardless of where the Bitcoin value is in the market, you’re still getting 6% of your one Bitcoin. It’s just going to be worthless. So that folks look at it on the staking side.
Brett:
Okay, that’s really good. So, we’re in a series called it’s no longer about cash flow, it’s about tax flow The idea is that cash flow is in 1099, and ordinary income tax that’s taxed at the highest levels, Douglas. So how do you get depreciation to offset and or let your income tax go to zero? One way, as commercial real estate experts that we love, is through multifamily investment properties, which can depreciate over 27 and a half years typically, but then you can accelerate the depreciation and there’s a thing called Bonus Depreciation, check with your CPA, we’re not giving legal tax advice or CPA on your particular circumstance. But if you do this in certain orders, and depending on if you can qualify what’s called a Real Estate Professional, you can get your income to go to zero and get basically like tax credits for this. So one idea I have with one of our Bitcoin clients, she bought Bitcoin for about 50,000 to 50 million. She’s exited 5 million of that with us. She had another 45 in there. She’s been doing this staking she had never sold just like he said that like most really ultra-high net worth, cryptocurrency folks never sell. But I asked her what’s kind of your goal? Well, my goal is to be tax-efficient as I can go. Have you considered going to the Deferred Sales Trust, tax-deferred, buying real estate, getting some depreciation, because you can partner with the trust to go buy the real estate so that when the income is coming in, it’s been depreciated? So it’s like tax-free money. So any thoughts there? Did you follow all that?
Douglas:
I followed it, it sounds absolutely fantastic. I’m not familiar with it. I’m familiar with a lot of folks that are in real estate that has gone and bought hundreds of even 1000s of multifamily units and talk about how they Pay Zero Taxes and have a tremendous income. So it’s incredible. I think how you can use the tax system to your advantage, but it’s not something that I’m familiar with. But obviously, if there’s a way that you can reduce the taxes if you do end up selling your cryptocurrencies, then that’s probably a good thing.
Brett:
Okay, someone throw one more at you too. Okay, so the other thing we explored was she exited at 54,000 a coin that was her target rate. At the point, she had about 50 million at 54,000 A coin so she said I’m ready to exit five which will pull make it to 45 in Bitcoin either five went to the Deferred Sales Trust with us. That 45 million at 54,000 went to 68,000 a coin, and we’re calling around like 60,000 a coin me like hey, like, did you know that we can exit right now all of your coin or a big portion of your coin, put into the Deferred Sales Trust and then you can actually partner with the trust to buy bitcoin? Should it ever drop in value now? No, this is the Monday morning quarterback, but I want to also see what you think about this. So in a perfect world, she would have exited at 68,000 a coin. At that point, her value of 45 would have went up to I don’t know maybe 62 or so. 65 now she’s tax-deferred waiting market tanks to 35,000 a coin, she can partner with the trust to go buy back into this Bitcoin and write it back up. So it’s the whole idea of we call it optimal timing, we call it tax for that cash flow, and that we have the ability to offset with appreciation, but also the ability to optimally time the market as best as we can, knowing that cryptocurrency typically has very high ups and very quick lows, and it does this. It’s a lot of its seems to be talking about pretty predictable. So any thoughts on what I just said? Does that make any sense? Or what would you say to that?
Douglas:
I’d say that I look at a lot of charts that are built based upon Monday morning quarterbacking, which means that we can look at it in the past and say, if we’ve done this, this has been great. But I think that what you have to remember is euphoria. Generally, when the prices of 69,000, everyone in your mother’s telling you to be buying here come in at 35,000, everyone’s in your mother’s telling you got to be selling here. So you got to have nerves of steel. The way that I trade Bitcoin, personally, is that I always look for when are people telling me that normally they don’t get involved in Bitcoin that they want to start buying. That’s when I start getting out of a couple. Then when it starts to collapse, and everyone’s telling me that it’s a sham, that’s when I start accumulating. But I do all of that through a tax-free account. So that, for me is less of a tax issue. But for sure, I think Bitcoin and Ethereum are our products where you can play with euphoria, you’ve just got to make sure that you take the other side because I think you’re right in that the market does get over its skis a little bit at times. Then other times is so fearful that people are willing to sell it all sorts of prices. If you can take your emotions and park them and instead trade them in a way that’s more mechanical.I think that it can be more powerful. Now, obviously, with the tax type situations that you can offer. That type of swing trading makes a lot of sense. But swing trading as well, for a lot of folks picking highs and picking bottoms, is sort of like picking your nose it’s not the best thing.
Brett:
For sure. I couldn’t agree with you more. I guess it’s the euphoria of the Deferred Sales Trust and just seen so many people feel trapped by that capital gains tax of the reasons why they don’t sell. In fact, for her, she worked for a big tech company, she literally never sold anything. I said you have like nerves of steel. She’s like part of that. But also I understood the future of it like I’m in the industry every single day. I told her she’s a tech genius. So she’s a part of it. So she could have the certainty of conviction on the future of it. So she was able to stay on. But you can see that I also didn’t want to sell because of this capital gains tax. So the staking. But then I found a business to be able to invest in and that’s part of why she ended up exiting and doing a tax-deferred. So if anyone’s curious about that, I want to explore that very situation, we’re happy to do that you go to capitalgainstaxsolutions.com. We also have a crypto Deferred Sales Trust Mastermind, where we try to make this very simple.it’s like a Deferred Sales Trust university class, totally free, you go tocapitalgainstaxsolutions.com, you can register, where we bring on clients, we bring on financial advisors, or maybe we’ll get Douglas on there to be a guest speaker for the class one day, I think that’d be great. We just talk and that happens at 10 am every Friday at 1 pm Eastern Time and 10 am Pacific Standard Time. You go to capitalgainstaxsolutions.com to register for free. That being said, we are over time, Douglas, you want to leave our listeners with one last thought here. We’ll definitely gonna have Douglas back on the show later on. But any last thoughts? Before we go anything else you want to share?
Douglas:
You know, there’s a lot of folks that are worried these days. They say we’re raising capital. We want to do a utility token. They’re worried about regulations There are simple ways to do capital raises where you can sell just to investors outside the US is called Regulations. I think that if folks are interested in raising capital, they should certainly get in touch with us and talk to us. There’s a lot of exciting opportunities that we can offer them and, and tell them about so. Thank you very much for the opportunity, Brett. It’s always nice being on here. Go to inx.co to learn more about us.
Brett:
Fantastic. Thanks, Douglas for being on the show.
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About Douglas Borthwick
Douglas Borthwick is the Chief Business Officer of INX. From 2012 through September 2018, Mr. Borthwick founded and built the Chapdelaine FX electronic and voice trading business for inter-dealer broker TP-ICAP. From 1996 through 2005, Mr. Borthwick worked with Morgan Stanley in a variety of capacities, including managing foreign exchange derivatives trading groups in New York and London, with a special focus on emerging markets. From 2005 to 2006, he was the head of Merrill Lynch’s strategic trading desk, and from 2006 to 2009, he was the head of Standard Chartered’s Latin American FX trading unit.
Mr. Borthwick supervised trading and research sectors for Faros Trading, a startup foreign exchange agency that was ultimately acquired by FXCM in 2013. Mr. Borthwick graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a bachelor’s degree in economics and Yale University’s School of Management with an MBA.
