Tokenovate appoints Alec Burns as Head of Product Technology

Tokenovate has appointed Dr Alec Burns as Head of Product Technology, adding a former VeChain AI product leader to the UK fintech's leadership team.

Burns will oversee product strategy, experience and delivery as Tokenovate expands its post-trade automation platform for institutional markets. His remit includes translating the company's technology into products that are easier to deploy at scale and helping shape the use of AI in areas including configuration, testing, exception management and operational insight.

Based in the UK, Tokenovate focuses on post-trade lifecycle automation and digital settlement for derivatives and securities financing transactions. Its model starts with the legal terms of a transaction and converts them into standardised data and defined lifecycle processes designed to produce auditable outcomes across the post-trade chain.

At the centre of that approach is Novat, the company's post-trade orchestration layer, which represents contractual rights and obligations as discrete settlement states.

Burns brings experience across artificial intelligence, blockchain, robotics and product development. Before joining Tokenovate, he built the AI product organisation at VeChain and advised large companies on AI strategy and delivery through his advisory practice, Metis Point.

He began his career as a Research Fellow in Robotics and AI at UCL before taking senior research and product roles at nChain and VeChain. Burns holds a PhD in Robotics and Autonomous Systems from the University of Liverpool, is a named inventor on nine patents and has authored a number of peer-reviewed publications.

The appointment comes as financial technology groups seek to tie tokenised market infrastructure more closely to existing legal and operational frameworks, particularly in post-trade processing, where institutions remain sensitive to settlement risk, data consistency and legal certainty.

Tokenovate's proposition is built around what it describes as a legal-first model, linking digital legal agreements, the FINOS Common Domain Model and programmable settlement. The company argues that this structure keeps post-trade workflows anchored to contractual intent while operating across both existing and emerging market infrastructure.

The hire also signals a push to strengthen product execution as Tokenovate moves from architecture and workflow design towards broader institutional deployment. His remit suggests the company is seeking to make systems based on tokenised or programmable settlement more accessible to market participants that still require conventional controls, audit trails and legal clarity.

Richard Baker, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Tokenovate, set out the company's view of the market backdrop.

"Tokenisation is changing market infrastructure, while legal certainty, common semantics and deterministic processing remain essential. Our focus is on giving institutions a practical way to automate post-trade processes while working across existing and emerging infrastructure.

"We appointed Alec because he combines a strong understanding of blockchain and AI with the product discipline required to turn complex engineering into dependable institutional software. That combination will be important as we scale deployment and adoption," Baker said.

Burns will also help shape how AI features are integrated into the company's products without displacing the central role of contractual terms and defined lifecycle events. Those terms and events will remain authoritative within Tokenovate's operating model.

The move reflects a wider trend in financial markets, where firms are exploring artificial intelligence to improve workflow management and exception handling but remain cautious about handing control of core legal or settlement decisions to systems that cannot easily be audited. In Tokenovate's case, the emphasis remains on deterministic post-trade processing, with AI intended to sit around that framework rather than replace it.

Outside his corporate roles, Burns is the creator and host of Untangling Web3, a podcast focused on blockchain and emerging technology with a reported weekly reach of more than 250,000 people. That profile gives him visibility beyond product and engineering circles as Tokenovate sharpens its position in the tokenised capital markets sector.

"Tokenovate's legal-first architecture keeps contractual intent, economic state and settlement outcomes synchronised across systems. My focus is to make that architecture composable, straightforward to deploy and ready for institutional scale, while applying AI and distributed technology with engineering discipline," Burns said.