CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig on Monday announced two senior appointments, naming Don Battle as chief data innovation officer and J Matthew Haws as senior advisor in the Office of the Chairman and Chicago Regional Administrator.
Battle joins from the SEC, where he served as senior advisor to Commissioner Hester Peirce on the agency’s Crypto Task Force and as assistant director in the Enforcement Division’s Data Science Group. Before the SEC, he was a virtual currency enforcement officer at FinCEN.
He will sit inside the CFTC’s Division of Data and serve on the Innovation Task Force, which the agency launched in March to develop regulatory frameworks for crypto, AI and prediction markets.
“I was lucky enough to work for Chairman Selig on the SEC’s Crypto Task Force, and to be asked to follow him to the CFTC is a true honor,” Battle said.
Haws, a derivatives lawyer with more than 13 years advising global financial institutions, most recently served as senior legal counsel at Marex in Chicago. He was previously a partner at Katten Muchin Rosenman, where he represented Futures Commission Merchants, broker-dealers and swap dealers in regulatory enforcement matters.
The appointments signal Selig is building out both the agency’s technology capabilities and its traditional derivatives oversight bench.
