Arjun Jayaram

Founder and CEO Baton Systems

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Arjun Jayaram is the founder and CEO of Baton Systems, a financial-market infrastructure company he started in 2016 to attack a problem he had watched from the inside at consumer-payments and social platforms: that the money and securities legs of a trade still settle on batch processes and correspondent-banking plumbing designed decades ago. Baton’s platform, Baton CORE, sits between a bank’s legacy systems and its counterparties and orchestrates the post-trade lifecycle in near real time across four modules — FX settlement, intraday liquidity, payments control, and collateral optimisation. The company states that its rails now carry close to $30 billion of value a day, have settled more than $29 trillion cumulatively, and are used by seven of the nine largest Western global systemically important banks. Jayaram’s distinctive position in the market is that he approached settlement as a distributed-systems problem rather than a banking-product one, and has argued publicly for intraday liquidity as a discipline in its own right, writing white papers on the subject and contributing to Federal Reserve task forces and ISDA working groups.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of Baton Systems, which he established in 2016; the company operates from offices in London, New York, San Francisco and Chennai.
• Built Baton CORE, comprising Core-FX, Core-Liquidity, Core-Payments and Core-Collateral, into infrastructure the company says handles close to $30 billion of value per day.
• Announced a collaboration with J.P. Morgan in December 2023 that integrated Baton’s Core-Collateral solution into J.P. Morgan’s CCP Margin Exchange, going live with its first CCP in November 2023.
• Partnered with Nasdaq on real-time collateral infrastructure, announced in March 2026.
• Extended the platform to regional and mid-market institutions through a partnership with Derivative Path announced in April 2026, and to clearing firms via a G.H. Financials deployment announced in July 2026.
• Participated in the OSTTRA, Baton and Partior expansion of the FX settlement ecosystem to tokenised commercial bank funds and 24/7 access, announced June 2025.
• Co-founded Compass Labs, a social and machine-learning advertising platform backed by NEA and Presidio Ventures, which was later acquired by Yahoo.
• Author of multiple white papers on intraday liquidity management and a contributor to Federal Reserve task forces and ISDA working groups, per Baton Systems’ own biography.

Professional Journey

Jayaram’s career began in software engineering rather than in banking, and that origin explains a good deal about how Baton is built. He co-founded Compass Labs, a machine-learning advertising platform that built audience models from public social data and served targeted campaigns on Twitter and Facebook through a product called CLIQ. The company raised $6 million from New Enterprise Associates and Presidio Ventures in February 2012, bringing its total to roughly $12 million, and was subsequently acquired by Yahoo. The contemporaneous press coverage of that round credits Dilip Venkatachari as the company’s founder and does not name Jayaram; Baton’s own biography describes Jayaram as a co-founder, and the two accounts are recorded here without attempting to reconcile them.

He then moved into large-scale platform engineering at Twitter, where his work sat in the anti-spam and platform-integrity area, and afterwards into payments at Dwolla, an early real-time payments network. Baton’s own account of his career frames these two stops as the formative ones: at Twitter he worked on adversarial, high-throughput distributed systems, and at Dwolla he saw directly how far the settlement layer beneath consumer and business payments lagged the interfaces on top of it. The gap between an instruction being sent and value actually moving became the thesis for his next company.

He founded Baton Systems in 2016 — the company was initially incorporated under a different name before rebranding — to apply that thesis to wholesale rather than retail finance. Rather than proposing that banks replace their core systems, Baton was designed as an orchestration layer that reads from existing ledgers and sequences the movement of cash and securities against agreed rules, so that settlement can be conditional, netted and observable in real time instead of reconciled after the fact. That design choice is what allowed the platform to be adopted inside GSIBs, which cannot rip out their books and records.

The company’s commercial trajectory since has been built on embedding into existing market infrastructure rather than competing with it. The December 2023 J.P. Morgan collaboration placed Baton’s Core-Collateral inside J.P. Morgan’s CCP Margin Exchange, letting tri-party collateral clients automate optimisation of collateral against margin calls across multiple clearing houses. The June 2025 work with OSTTRA and Partior extended FX settlement to tokenised commercial bank funds with 24/7 availability. In March 2026 Nasdaq partnered with Baton on real-time collateral infrastructure, and in April 2026 a partnership with Derivative Path opened the FX product to regional banks that had previously lacked the scale to run it. A G.H. Financials deployment announced in July 2026 brought the liquidity management platform to the clearing side.

Alongside the commercial work, Jayaram has taken a public-policy and standards role, authoring white papers on intraday liquidity management and contributing to Federal Reserve task forces and ISDA working groups — positioning that reflects a company whose product only works if the surrounding market conventions move with it.

Education

No education could be established for Arjun Jayaram from any primary or independently verifiable source. Baton Systems’ own biography page carries no educational detail, and the contact-data aggregators that do list degrees derive them from professional-network scrapes that are excluded as a source for this profile.