Tokenovate, the UK financial technology company providing post-trade workflows-as-a-service and programmable settlement solutions, has appointed Dr Alec Burns as Head of Product Technology. He joins the leadership team to strengthen product strategy, scale institutional deployment and advance the company’s technology roadmap.
Burns will focus on translating Tokenovate’s technology into intuitive, scalable and deployable products for institutional market participants. His remit spans product strategy, experience and delivery, bringing together the company's capabilities across digital legal agreements, the operationalisation of the FINOS Common Domain Model and programmable settlement.
These capabilities support Tokenovate’s legal-first approach to post-trade automation. The platform starts with the agreed legal terms of a transaction and translates them into standardised data and deterministic lifecycle processes, so that authorised events produce consistent and auditable outcomes across the post-trade lifecycle. At the core of this approach is Novat, Tokenovate’s post-trade orchestration layer, which represents contractual rights and obligations as discrete settlement states.
Burns brings more than a decade of experience across AI, blockchain, robotics and product development. He previously built the AI product organisation at VeChain and, through his AI advisory practice Metis Point, has advised multi-billion-dollar enterprises on AI strategy and delivery.
Building on Tokenovate’s existing architecture, Burns will also help shape the integration of AI capabilities into the company’s product offering and future roadmap. The focus will be on areas including configuration, testing, exception management and operational insight, while contractual terms and defined lifecycle events remain authoritative.
Richard Baker, CEO and Founder of Tokenovate commented, “Tokenisation is changing market infrastructure, while legal certainty, common semantics and deterministic processing remain essential. Our focus is on giving institutions a practical way to automate post-trade processes while working across existing and emerging infrastructure.
“We appointed Alec because he combines a strong understanding of blockchain and AI with the product discipline required to turn complex engineering into dependable institutional software. That combination will be important as we scale deployment and adoption.”
Dr Alec Burns, Head of Product Technology at Tokenovate, added, “Tokenovate’s legal-first architecture keeps contractual intent, economic state and settlement outcomes synchronised across systems. My focus is to make that architecture composable, straightforward to deploy and ready for institutional scale, while applying AI and distributed technology with engineering discipline.”
Burns holds a PhD in Robotics and Autonomous Systems from the University of Liverpool and began his career as a Research Fellow in Robotics and AI at UCL, before moving into senior research and product roles at nChain and VeChain. He is a named inventor on nine patents and has authored multiple peer-reviewed publications.
He is also the creator and host of Untangling Web3, a podcast covering blockchain and emerging technology that reaches more than 250,000 people each week.
