#30 Fed Chief Innovation Officer, Sunayna Tuteja
On her vision for the Fed and conviction in crypto
Welcome! I’m Simi Shah, and every other week, I dive deep into the journey of a South Asian trailblazer. If you enjoy this issue, please encourage your friends to subscribe and follow us.
Season 3 Finale 🎙️ Sunayna Tuteja, Chief Innovation Officer @ the Federal Reserve
For our Season 3 finale 🎉, I caught up with Sunayna Tuteja, the first-ever Chief Innovation Officer of the Federal Reserve.
Prior to joining the Fed in February of 2021, Sunayna served as the Global Head of Emerging Tech & Strategic Partnerships at TD Ameritrade. She spent a number of years building out their cryptocurrency and blockchain practices as Head of Digital Assets. Prior to TD Ameritrade, she was at TD Bank, leading digital transformation. She brings 10+ years of experience leading change and innovation at the nexus of finance, technology, and policy. And she spent a number of years in banking and in the venture capital and tech ecosystem both in North America and Asia. Sunayna is a total firecracker — a trailblazer fit for our Season 3 finale!
Excerpts from the pod below:
Obviously you've had this amazing career for the greater part of a decade, but how do you actually get tapped for such an impactful role that didn’t exist previously?
I don’t think I’ve shared this publicly, so you might be the first to hear and read it. Full transparency, working at the Federal Reserve as their Chief Innovation Officer was not on my 2021 Bingo card. When I first was approached for this, I spent the first five minutes thinking that this executive recruiter was one of my crypto friends pulling a prank on me. Then, I thought, wait, ‘What does the Fed need an innovation officer for?’ I thought innovation and central banking was a bit of an oxymoron.
Now the good news is, for better or for worse, I have a very strong curiosity DNA. And in this case, my curiosity far exceeded my skepticism. And the more conversations I had about it, the more I learned about this assignment, two things stood out. One, that this was the inaugural role, and so you got to come, do, and ship wins, but also set precedents of what this role could be. The other thing was just how mission-oriented the Federal Reserve System is. Not every organization has such a strong DNA of pride, mission, and the work they do in serving the U.S. economy and consumer. And I'm a sucker for that. I need to know that I'm doing something fulfilling and making a meaningful dent. And it was very much connected to all the work I've done around innovation and transformation. I’m always asking: how do we break down these barriers that continue to keep people out of the big tech? How do we minimize opacity and complexity in financial services, and maximize accessibility and empowerment for mainstream consumers? So all of those things together, I said ‘Yeah, this is it.’
thing i admire most about the #bitcoin community is resilience. sheer amount of shade & schadenfreude directed at bitcoin and the community over the years is enough to make anyone curl up into a ball. 1/3There is a distrust of crypto and blockchain, often among government agencies and institutions and people working within them. What made you buy in?
It really started to make a dent for me is as I started to understand some of the properties around censorship resistance and the value of the code. Now I will say, Bitcoin is like our generation’s Rorschach test because we all see in it what we want it to be. We all have a very strong argument and thesis for why it's a payment rail, why it's a hedge against inflation, why it’s digital gold. So we ascribe all of these dreams and aspirations to this single asset. And over the course of the last 13 years, certain things have manifested and certain things haven't.
I come from a family of immigrants. I'm an immigrant myself to the US. To the point on censorship resistance: I remember hearing stories of my family being displaced during the Partition, and family members, talking about how overnight, they had to make a decision about leaving their home and everything they own. My great grandmother says, 'I put on every piece of gold jewelry I had, the clothes on our backs, and left everything else behind.’ And I often thought, ‘What if they had Bitcoin or some digital asset or some way of digitizing their property?’ So some of it connects to me and my family history. The other big thing for me is the notion of financial inclusion, and how crypto gets us there.
You've made it past your first 180 days. What's your next big goal as CIO of the Federal Reserve?
If I were to depart this role in a few years, and look back and reflect, I think there's a couple markers that are important to me. One is to ensure we have a very fertile ecosystem of decentralized innovation — giving it that sense of purpose, that rigor, but also the right infrastructure, so that the talented people that we have across the Fed, agnostic of geography or hierarchy, are empowered to really innovate within their span of control, so that they don't need permission. I'm a big believer that the best innovation comes out of talent that's closest to the end customer or to the end process. And that's why I often say I'm just one node in this network. I am not the one that's going to come up with the brilliant idea. My job is to remove all the hurdles, and really enable and empower every person within the Fed who has an idea, who sees a problem statement, and just needs that muscle memory, that sponsorship to say ‘Yes, go do it. We’ve got your back.’
Hear more about Sunayna’s vision for the Fed — full episode on Apple, Spotify, or on our website!
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