Founder and CEO, Adhara.io, Boadilla del Monte

Postgraduate studies in United States, 1998

Julio’s career has been running for more than 20 years along the worlds of Technology and Financial Services, and he now focuses on digital assets, blockchain and distributed ledgers, particularly on their applications for financial institutions, public institutions and enterprises in general.

He started out as chip designer, then worked for 6 years at McKinsey & Co serving top financial institutions globally, and then worked for 11 years for Santander, playing many corporate leadership roles in Investment Banking, Consumer Finance, IT & Operations, and global M&A.

He has been leading Santander's activities around crypto-currencies, blockchain and distributed ledgers for years, and has led the creation of many relevant industry consortia. He was the founding chairman of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, and the chairman of Spain's Alastria network, a member of the board of the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance, one of the original promoters of the Utility Settlement Coin project (that later became Fnality), and an advisor to startups, corporates and regulatory / government bodies regarding blockchain technology and their implications

In July 2018 Julio became a full time entrepreneur and CEO of Adhara, a company that seeks to help financial institutions and corporates leverage smart contracts and blockchain to improve the execution of international payments and optimize liquidity management, in partnership with ConsenSys. Adhara works closely with Fnality, partnering to build the new digital (tokenized) settlement layers for financial market infrastructures based on tokenized central bank money.

An engineer at heart, Julio holds a Telecommunication Engineering degree from UPM-Spain, a PhD in Computer Science / Electrical Engineering from UAM-Spain, and a MsC in Management of Technology from MIT-Sloan