Cook Named Chairman as SSimple Gets Funding

SSimple, a distributed ledger technology-based technology platform, says it has appointed a new CEO and received angel funding for its business, which seeks to evolve the storage and sharing of standing settlement instructions (SSI) in financial markets.

Swift veteran Matthew Cook has been appointed as chairman of the business with immediate effect, he has been a strategic advisor to the firm from the start of 2023. He was last at Swift, where he worked for eight years responsible for business development in capital markets and FX services. Prior to that he spent over eight years in analyst roles at Credit Suisse and UBS.

“As the industry grapples with shorter settlement cycles and maintains a strong focus on reducing transactional costs and friction, this is an exciting time to be joining SSimple,” says Cook. “Accurate, authenticated, and timely SSIs have long been a consistent challenge, hindering the realisation of a fully straight-through-processing vision within the industry.

“This hindrance has been exacerbated by error-prone manual processes and costly, outdated legacy platforms,” he continues. “Leveraging SSimple’s innovative SaaS approach, we present a cost-efficient effective and readily implementable solution across multiple asset classes for the 21st century, with the goal being to transform this vision into reality.”

The sum of the funding, which was led by private individuals, was not disclosed, but Bill Meenaghan, SSimple CEO, says, “I am pleased to share that SSimple has concluded its angel funding round, accompanied by Matthew’s acceptance of the chairman’s role. These advancements empower us to automate the archaic SSI process for an expanded range of firms. This, in turn, will further enhance the accuracy, speed, and security of the settlement process, particularly with the imminent arrival of T+1. I look forward to seeing what we can achieve together in the coming months.”