Marieke Flament has quit NatWest's online business banking offshoot Mettle to join Swiss-based blockhain foundation Near.
Born in France, Flament trained as a computer engineer and has worked in a diverse range of companies from the luxury giant LVMH of Louis Vuitton fame to Boston Consulting Group, Expedia’s Hotels.com, crypto giant Circle and for the past two-and-a-half years at Mettle.
During her time at Circle she was managing director of European operations, where she took to market several products and built a user base from 0-2 million in less than 2 years. Shortly after that she became the company’s first global CMO, leading the branding and rollout of the USDC stablecoin.
After her position at Circle, Flament became the CEO of SME banking app Mettle. During her time in the role, she launched the app and grew the team from 50 to 250 employees.
Flament will be joining Near as CEO in January. The company, which recently picked up $800 million in funding, runs a permissionless, proof-of-stake blockchain which gives software developers easy access to build new crypto applications, from Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to decentralised finance products - and to launch new business models and consumer products. The company also has started working with crypto payment provider MoonPay to make the platform accessible in 150 countries worldwide.
Since its launch in 2020, Near’s ecosystem has processed more than 50 million transactions, across more than 1.7 million accounts, and helped incubate and foster over 200 projects and 300 DAOs.