Sultan Meghji, who stepped down as chief
innovation officer at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. earlier this year,
has a new job.
Meghji tweeted
on Tuesday that he will join Reciprocal Ventures as a senior adviser.
Reciprocal invests in early stage fintechs. Its
portfolio includes Squads, an app that can be used to create decentralized
autonomous organizations (DAOs), and Whym, a conversational commerce startup.
The company is one of six investors behind the
launch of a $205 million ecosystem fund for The Graph, an indexing layer for
Web3 and blockchain data.
Meghji, who resigned
from the FDIC on Feb. 18, was the agency’s first chief innovation
officer. He held the post for about a year.
Shortly after leaving the agency, he wrote a op-ed
for Bloomberg, saying he “found barriers to innovation” at virtually every
agency he worked with. He collaborated with the Federal Reserve, the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau and other federal agencies during his stint at the
FDIC.
Meghji also expressed concern that existing
regulation may be inadequate to address modern technological challenges.
“Serving in this role was an honor, but my decision
to leave was right,” he wrote. “The federal bureaucracy is both hesitant and
hostile to technological change. America’s global financial leadership is in
jeopardy.”
Meghji also took issue with the level of
knowledge at various federal departments.
“I estimate that across the agencies I
encountered, less than one-tenth of staff had a basic understanding of the
technologies they regulate,” he said. “Even senior officials — those who lead
regulatory development and implementation — are baffled by concepts like
fintech, the dark web and even financial apps.”
The hiring process was another area of concern.
“The federal hiring process does a poor job of
identifying and keeping the best candidates,” he said.
“I lost track of the number of times I was told
to hire someone with few qualifications over a proven technology specialist,”
Meghji added. “The government must put applied digital knowledge front and center instead of prioritizing
government tenure and unrelated qualifications.”
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