Early in her career, Nicole Olson helped take w-Trade Technologies public during the dot com boom of the early 2000s. She managed investor relations for the firm; New York City was in full swing with easy money flowing all around.

“I was bit by that innovation bug,” she told me recently. While w-Trade didn’t sell shares before the Internet crash, Olson gravitated to the fast-paced process of starting and building companies. After later jobs with fintech firms trying to disrupt traditional Wall Street trading, Olson is now vice president of digital product development and innovation at State Street. The title is a mouthful but the short of it is Olson is all in on crypto and web3.

“It’s more than a wave, it’s a whole ecosystem shift,” she said. After the Internet changed how many industries operated, “I couldn’t foresee another disruptive technology at this scale coming into the market,” she said. “It’s the best place to be. Institutions are interested. It’s a global story.”

State Street is probably best known as one of the largest custodial banks in the world, meaning it’s really good at holding your assets for you. And while Olson may not be in the same vein of traditional Wall Street bankers who go with the system, she is one of many financial professionals with deep experience in traditional markets like stocks and bonds who are now applying that knowledge to digital assets.

Read more: A Trader’s Life: Chris Hehmeyer’s Journey from the Chicago Pits to Switzerland’s Crypto Valley

State Street created a standalone digital division last year and works with many of its clients on what’s called distributed ledger technology, or DLT. That’s a blockchain system where the users know each other through a private network unlike the pseudonymous nature of public blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

“It was clear that DLT was going to touch everything, all the underpinnings of our financial market,” she said. Olson previously created the equity capital markets business at Liquidnet, an electronic stock-trading firm, and co-founded Electronifie, which offered computerized trading in corporate bonds (it was acquired in 2017).

State Street is selling what blockchain technology can do for a business, rather than the tech itself, in areas like risk management, asset transformation and other efficiencies, she said.

“The bank evolved last year from viewing our group as building proofs-of-concept to looking at our group as the drivers of growth and the future of the bank,” Olson said. Nadine Chakar, who ran the global markets division, is now head of State Street Digital.

The money managers who make up a lot of State Street’s clients want direct exposure to Bitcoin and Ether as well as services like staking coins and managing assets under custody, Olson said. There’s also a lot of investor demand for tokenizing traditional securities like mutual funds.

Mutual funds are sold today with many links in the chain – from retail distribution to ownership records being recorded at a custodial bank to the payment method and trade settlement that can take up to three days. Then there are the fees that come out of the sale at every step, up to 5 percent, Olson said.

“In the tokenized version… the issuer can help consolidate that,” she said. “They’re able to expand their role, they’re able to have a more direct relationship with those end investors to speed up the actual settlement.” That saves money as well, Olson said.

“The bank evolved last year from viewing our group as building proofs-of-concept to looking at our group as the drivers of growth and the future of the bank”

On a broader note, much of the investor class has come around to digital assets because it’s very hard to watch Bitcoin go from nothing to $60,000 in a number of years and not want in. Certainly when compared to more traditional investment options.

“Finding alpha in today’s market is more complicated,” Olson said. Whereas in 2018 when she joined State Street most customer inquiries about crypto were educational in nature, that all changed in 2021. “Institutional interest has increased significantly,” she said. “They’re not ignoring it. They can’t ignore it.”