Why is the Chief Financial Officer of Bakkt Holdings Inc. leaving the firm?

Bakkt’s CFO is departing from the crypto firm next month after completing his tenure of slightly more than a year.

On Friday, in an announcement, it was made clear that Drew Labenne, who’s the current Chief Financial Officer of Georgia based crypto startup Bakkt Holdings Inc. will be leaving the firm, and his place will be taken by Karen Alexander, who’s Chief accounting Officer at present. Alexander, who worked with GE Capital previously in finance and accounting roles, will be stopping into the CFO role on an interim basis.

An employee of the firm, knowing about this topic, stated that Drew LaBenne earlier this week informed that he would step down from his role as CFO of Bakkt by next month. While describing LaBenne, the person explained that he was a fantastic leader who led the company through a handful of pivotal and crucial moments like their public listening, creating their finance and risk organizations, presenting their firm’s stories to their investors, and much more like these.

It was 2018 when Bakkt entered the market, having plans to launch a bucket of plans and initiatives related to cryptocurrencies. Such projects include bitcoin derivatives-like initiatives and have launched its retail application ever since that supports the purchasing of crypto along with allowing its users to cash a fixed amount of reward points. The crypto derivative firm also avails its users of the technology for third-party businesses and merchants. The feature enables them to offer services related to digital assets to their clients.

Initially, the leading exchange giant Intercontinental Exchange brought Bakkt into the ecosystem, and Kelly Loeffler was the first Chief Executive Officer of the firm, the wife of CEO of ICE, Jeff Sprecher. In 2019, Loeffler was tapped to fill one of the US Senate’s seats from Georgia, which made her leave the firm. It was quite recent when Bakkt also saw its president and one of the early employees, Adam White, leave the firm by the end of last year.

LaBenne previously worked as the Chief Financial Officer of the banking giant JPMorgan in its banking business from the year 2013 to 2015. Later he served as Amalgamated Finance Corp Chief Financial OFficer from 2015 to 2021 and later joined Bakkt after leaving the firm.