Tokenovate names Alec Burns head of product technology

Tokenovate, a UK financial technology firm, announced the appointment of Dr Alec Burns as Head of Product Technology. The company said Burns will lead product strategy, help scale institutional deployment and advance its legal-first tokenisation platform.

Burns will join Tokenovate’s leadership team with responsibility for product strategy, user experience and delivery. His role includes uniting the company’s capabilities across digital legal agreements, the operationalisation of the FINOS Common Domain Model and programmable settlement, with the aim of making the platform easier to configure, test and operate at scale while keeping contractual terms and defined lifecycle events authoritative.

Tokenovate’s platform begins with the agreed legal terms of a transaction and converts those terms into standardised data and deterministic lifecycle processes so authorised events produce consistent, auditable outcomes across the post-trade lifecycle. Novat, the company’s post-trade orchestration layer, represents contractual rights and obligations as discrete settlement states. Tokenovate said Burns will work to make that architecture composable and straightforward to deploy for institutions that connect to existing and emerging market infrastructure.

Part of Burns’ brief is to shape how artificial intelligence is used in the firm’s products. Tokenovate plans to apply AI in configuration, testing, exception management and operational insight, while retaining the legal-first model to govern contractual intent, economic state and settlement outcomes. The company said the appointment will support its institutional rollout and technology roadmap.

Burns holds a PhD in Robotics and Autonomous Systems from the University of Liverpool. He began his career as a research fellow in robotics and AI at University College London and later held senior research and product roles at nChain and VeChain. He led AI product development at VeChain, advised large enterprises on AI strategy through his consultancy Metis Point, is named on nine patents, has authored peer-reviewed research and hosts the podcast Untangling Web3, which reaches more than 250,000 listeners weekly.

Richard Baker, Tokenovate’s CEO and founder, commented: ‘Institutions need a reliable way to automate post-trade processes across current and new infrastructure. Alec combines experience in blockchain and AI with the product discipline required to turn engineering work into dependable institutional software.’

Dr Alec Burns said: ‘My focus is to make the architecture composable and easy for institutions to deploy at scale, while applying AI and distributed technology with engineering discipline.’

The appointment follows Tokenovate’s approach of translating legal agreements into deterministic, auditable settlement workflows that operate alongside existing systems rather than replacing them.