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Ami Ben-David
Founder & CEO at Ownera. Investing and working on the tokenization of the financial industry since 2017. Formerly co-founder and managing partner at SPiCE VC, Securitize, EverythingMe, Ki-Bi
Ami Ben-David is a highly accomplished professional with a background in Industrial Engineering, Management, and Information Systems.
He holds a Bachelor of Science - BSc degree, graduating Cum Laude from the prestigious Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
Throughout his career, Ami has held key roles in various organizations, showcasing his expertise and leadership abilities.
Some of his notable positions include Co-Founder & CEO at Ownera, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at SPiCE VC, and Founder and CEO at Workgroup App.
His experience also extends to roles such as Co-Founder at EverythingMe, SVP International Operations at Oberon Media, and VP Sales and Marketing at Ki-Bi Mobile Technologies.
Ami's diverse professional background includes VP Investments at Magma Venture Partners, Senior Consultant at Magic Software Enterprises, and Co-Founder at AladdinSoft.
His extensive experience reflects a deep understanding of business development, product management, financial software, investments, and more.
Highlights
BlackRock's CEO, Larry Fink, talks in the video below about Tokenization as the next step for the financial industry (min 2:38), following the launch of their Bitcoin ETF.
His vision covers both sides of the tokenization equation:
- Every investor will have their own identification.
- Every asset will exist on one ledger.
I agree. This is indeed the key to unlocking all the advantages of tokenization from customizing strategies for investors with access to any suitable asset, to global distribution for assets with access to any suitable investor, as well as liquidity and leverage.
At the same time, this is also why the market has not scaled until now - because without INTEROPERABILITY half the market competes to control the investor relationship, the other half competes to control the asset relationship, and they can't talk to each other at scale. Without interoperability - there is no scalable market.
This is finally changing in 2024, with the deployment of Ownera FinP2P Routers across the financial industry.
It is the culmination of a multi-year effort that saw the open FinP2P interoperability protocol launched in 2022, and proven with dozens of PoCs, pilots and production launches in 2023. It is market ready. Not only the technology works, it is regulation compliant world wide, it solves the liability challanges, and it is commercially viable across use cases - from Liquidity (intra-day repo, MMFs), to Alts (RE, PE) to Bonds and other debt instruments.
The Ownera FinP2P routers enable the core vision articulated by Larry Fink - The investor-facing institutions grant each investor a unique identity (connected to the user's custodian). The asset-facing institutions issue each asset on a ledger, managed by a TA (or equivalent), where the asset always stays - so each asset has a Single Source of Truth.
The routers connect them directly, and enable instant distribution, liquidity and instant settlement across all of them, regardless of underlying technologies used by each institution.
Every interoperability solution brought to the market that is based on Bridges rather than Routers, failed on multiple accounts - bridges are clearly prone to theft and security breaches, regulation for bridges is unclear as there is a new entity in the middle, they are very inflexible in terms of commercial business cases, and most importantly - there is often no single source of truth. As such they do not fulfill the basic requirements as outlined by Larry Fink for the future of tokenization.
The good news is that Ownera Routers are being deployed. 2024 will be the year we will see tokenization scaling in the financial industry. If we get it right, as an industry, 2025 will be the year we will see exponential growth in this market that will suppress the AUM of any other technology in the market.
Happy new year!
