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While much of the financial services industry is planning around digital assets for the future, Donna Milrod is treating them as a reality driving business today. As executive vice president and chief product officer at State Street, she has spent the past three years turning what much of the industry was still piloting into live, institutional-grade infrastructure—and she is just getting started.
Appointed CPO in late 2022, Milrod oversees product development and management for approximately 80% of State Street's business, leading a team of some 600 professionals across investment servicing—including digital assets—and enterprise-wide digital transformation.
The scope of her mandate has expanded steadily. In January, State Street announced the launch of its Digital Asset Platform, a secure, scalable infrastructure for tokenized assets that bridges traditional and digital finance. It's core to the bank offering tokenized money market funds and ETFs, tokenized deposits and stablecoins.
That same infrastructure enabled another first: State Street becoming the first third-party custodian to go live on J.P. Morgan's Digital Debt Service, providing custody, settlement, and servicing for tokenized debt securities on blockchain. For Milrod, these are not experiments. "We have moved beyond experimentation and into real production use," she said. "Tokenization is about modernizing market infrastructure to improve settlement, liquidity, and access, while staying grounded in how financial systems actually operate."
Her work extends well beyond digital assets. Milrod drove the launch of ETF360, a real-time transparency platform covering the ETF operations lifecycle from basket production through settlement. She spearheaded the acquisition of PriceStats, a near real-time inflation and macroeconomic data platform now powering State Street Data Intelligence. She led a strategic partnership and minority investment in Apex Fintech Solutions to build out digital wealth infrastructure, expanded transfer agency capabilities with an investment in ZILO, and steered the integration of State Street's alternative fund administration services with iCapital's investor lifecycle technology.
Across the client portal MyStateStreet, her team is embedding agentic AI to transform static dashboards into proactive, workflow-driven experiences in alternatives as well.
Managing an agenda of this breadth requires a particular kind of discipline. "My leadership approach has always been execution-driven, with a focus on innovation at scale, delivering real outcomes for our clients, for our employees, and shareholders," Milrod said. "My job is to set clear priorities, remove friction for teams, and make sure what we deliver is durable, secure, and fit for purpose."
It is a posture that has earned recognition five consecutive years running on American Banker's
