As ICON’s newly appointed Head of Institutional Markets and Contributor Relations, Ricky Dodds knows the ICON community is hungry for information. And he’d like to give it to them.

“I do think there’s this sense that the community wants to know more and we haven’t necessarily given them what they wanted,” he says. “I think my role in particular will be to address those issues – more transparency, more candor at times on where we stand as a project and what we’re seeking to do short and long-term for that matter.”

The veteran investment banker and equity researcher might not be a coding genius, but he knows business and, just as importantly, he knows how to communicate – a useful skill indeed, as recent events have made abundantly clear. At ICON, Dodds will engage with the global audience and explore new markets for the ICON project, bolstering community confidence and providing opportunities for the platform to grow and prosper.

Joining a growing space

Prior to joining ICON, Dodds spent eight years at Deutsche Bank in the United States. Though he spent the first five of those years in traditional investment banking, he eventually moved into equity research, becoming a Vice President. He says, “I really liked the idea of doing more fundamental research on particular companies, sectors and industries.”

With his research focused on banking, Dodds got interested in blockchain around 2014-2015, when Bitcoin and blockchain started attracting attention in the financial institution sector. In 2017 – after reading an article on the impact blockchain could have in the financial sector – he began thinking blockchain was something around which he could build a career.

“I always knew I wanted to be part of the fintech space covering financial institutions,” he says. “I just saw how much investment was going into it not only in the US but globally and how much it touches the actual consumer, how much we utilize our smartphone now for all of our banking services. Blockchain, AI and natural language among other technologies will push this space even further going forward.”

Judging a project on its own merits



Dodds brings a particular skill set to ICON, bringing to the organization expertise in strategy operations, contributor relations and institutional markets. Though he spent much of his time at Deutsche Bank meeting with investors, hedge funds and other institutions, he often talked with investor relations teams, too, on how they could position their companies, examining spaces in their entirety to determine where companies stacked up against their competitors. That kind of experience translates well in the blockchain space, where ICON, too, is keen to know how it stacks up against other projects tackling similar issues. He says, “We’re thinking about how ICON can position ourselves as a top-tier project that provides very clear information about the project.”

Though the definition of his job is a bit fluid right now, Dodds thinks his short-term goal is to improve the transparency and consistency of ICON’s message. This, he says, will heavily involve the ICON community. One of the community’s biggest and longest held concerns has been the lack of regular communication with the ICON team, he says. Though he says the community is unlikely to get a livestream of ICON’s office so they could see with their own eyes whether staff are burning the midnight oil to roll out projects, he does think that the team “owes the community a little bit more on the development side.”