Former U.S. Department of the Treasury official to provide policy expertise to Ripple Labs
San Francisco, Calif. – July 29, 2015 – Ripple Labs, the global leader in distributed payments technology and supporters of the Ripple protocol, today announced that it has named Michael S. Barr, former official at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and at the Brookings Institution, as an advisor to the company.
“I’m excited to be joining the Advisory Board of Ripple Labs,” said Barr. “Our global payments system is badly outdated. I think innovation in payments can help make the financial system safer, reduce cost, and improve access and efficiency for consumers and businesses alike.”
Barr joins a number of Ripple Labs advisors with government or financial sector experience, including former National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling, former State Department official Anja Manuel, and former CEO of The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) Donald Donahue.
Barr is the Roy F. and Jean Humphrey Proffitt Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, Professor of Public Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Faculty Director of the Center on Finance, Law and Policy, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and at the Brookings Institution.
Under President Obama, he served as the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions, and was a key architect of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.
Under President Clinton, Barr served as Special Assistant to the Treasury Secretary, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Community Development Policy, as Special Advisor to President Clinton, as Special Advisor and Counselor on the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department.
Previously, Barr served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter, and to Judge Pierre Leval, then of the Southern District of New York.
Barr currently serves on a number of private sector, government, and nonprofit advisory boards, including Lending Club, ideas42, Financial Solutions Lab, the FDIC Committee on Economic Inclusion, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and the U.S. Financial Diaries Project. He is also a fellow at the Filene Research Institute.
Barr received his J.D. from Yale Law School, an M. Phil in International Relations from Magdalen College, Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar, and his B.A., summa cum laude, with Honors in History, from Yale University.
“I am excited to welcome Michael to the Ripple Labs team,” said Ripple Labs CEO and co-founder Chris Larsen. “He has spent his entire career in pursuit of a more equitable and efficient financial system – within government, as an academic, and with many of today’s leading financial innovators. We will lean on his insights and expertise as we continue to build Ripple into a critical piece of the world’s financial technology infrastructure.“
Ripple Labs supports the adoption of Ripple, a distributed payments technology that connects the world’s disparate financial networks to securely transfer funds in any currency in real time. Banks, money transmitters and clearing houses can use Ripple as an alternative to correspondent banking to facilitate straight-through processing with no reserve funding required. For more information about Ripple, please visit http://www.ripple.com.
About Ripple Labs
Ripple Labs is the global leader in distributed payments technology. The team supports adoption of Ripple, a technology that powers the free and instant exchange of anything of value, and the creation of an Internet of Value (IoV).
Ripple Labs’ team of more than 100 is comprised of deeply experienced cryptographers, security experts, distributed network developers, Silicon Valley and Wall Street veterans. They contribute code to the open-source software, as well as develop tools for and recruit financial institutions and payment networks to use Ripple. The team shepherds a movement to evolve finance so that payment systems are open, secure, constructive and globally inclusive.
About Ripple
Ripple is an Internet protocol that interconnects all the world’s disparate financial systems to power the secure transfer of funds in any currency in real time – it enables an Internet of Value (IoV). As settlement infrastructure, Ripple transforms and enhances today’s financial systems. Ripple unlocks assets and provides access to payment systems for everyone, empowering the world to move value like information moves today. For more information about Ripple, please visit http://www.ripple.com.
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Michael Azzano
Cosmo PR for Ripple Labs
415/596-1978