Good morning. Taking on a CFO role for the first time is no small feat. Doing it at Binance, the world’s largest digital currency exchange, in the aftermath of what has been described as the biggest heist in crypto history, is quite another.
Justin Yek, a former VP of finance at Airwallex, will become Binance’s new CFO, succeeding Kaiser Ng, who has held the position since 2022 and is stepping down to pursue a new venture, the company said Saturday. Binance said the transition had been planned for the past six months and had no connection to its recent security breach.
That’s a significant distinction. On Oct. 29, hackers drained an estimated $6.3 billion from the platform, Fortune’s Jeff John Roberts reported. Binance later said North Korean hackers orchestrated the attack, using social engineering and malicious software to compromise engineers and gain access to systems that enabled unauthorized withdrawals.
The damage was partly contained. Tether and Circle froze about $2.5 billion in stolen stablecoins. Binance says it has replenished 98% of the stolen coins through reserve funds and other sources, and that users won’t bear the losses. Read more here.
But, the incident brings questions that go beyond cybersecurity. How strong are Binance’s internal controls? And how can the exchange convince customers and regulators that their assets are safe?
Those are questions that will inevitably land on the new CFO’s desk.
Yek brings a résumé suited to a growing global fintech. At Airwallex, he progressed from head of strategic finance and corporate development to VP of finance, leading the company’s global finance team. Before that, he spent about nine years in investment banking at Citi and Morgan Stanley, working on more than $30 billion in equity, M&A and debt transactions, according to his LinkedIn profile.
That’s substantial experience in corporate finance and dealmaking. But the CFO title is new to Yek, and he lacks the crypto-exchange experience of Ng, who joined Binance from Kraken.
Cybersecurity is increasingly a finance issue, not just an IT concern. The financial consequences of a breach, including lost assets, customer remediation, regulatory scrutiny and reputational damage, can ultimately fall on the CFO. For example, Deloitte’s Q3 2026 CFO Signals survey found cybersecurity was the top external concern for finance chiefs, cited by 50%, ahead of the economy and inflation.
At Binance, Yek’s first test as CFO will be helping restore the trust that money alone can’t replace.
Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
