Binance chief financial officer Kaiser Ng is leaving the exchange, and Justin Yek, most recently vice president of finance at payments company Airwallex, will replace him. Co-CEO Yi He announced the change on Saturday 7 November in a statement to Bloomberg, relayed by Reuters, TechCrunch and The Block. She gave no date for Ng’s last day, no start date for Yek and no name for the venture Ng is leaving to pursue.
The announcement lands nine days after the 29 October attack on Binance, which The Block calls the largest crypto theft on record. Yi He said the handover had been planned over the past six months, which would put its start well before the attack. That account of the timeline is Binance’s own; the company has not published any document that dates the plan.
The theft, put at $6.3 billion by Reuters and TechCrunch and at more than $6 billion by The Block, is followed in our running report on the Binance hack, and the FBI has since named North Korea’s TraderTraitor as the attacker, as covered in our report on the FBI attribution.
What Yi He’s statement says, and what it leaves out
In the words quoted by Reuters and TechCrunch, Ng “has decided to pursue a new venture after more than five years at Binance”. Yi He added that a transition plan had been “implemented over the last half year”, in Reuters’ rendering of the statement. The Block headlined the same point as a transition planned six months ago.
That is close to everything on the record. The statement does not say when Ng’s departure takes effect, The Block noted, nor what the new venture is. The Defiant’s headline has Ng preparing to leave, which fits a handover still under way. Whether Ng stays on in any advisory role is not known either.
No reporting connects Ng to the hack. Gizmodo wrote that there has been no reporting indicating the departing CFO had anything to do with the incident, and neither Binance’s statement nor any outlet covering it suggests a connection. If the six-month figure is accurate, the handover began around May 2026. Binance did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Kaiser Ng, Binance CFO since January 2022 by The Block’s and Reuters’ account
Ng has been chief financial officer since January 2022, according to The Block and Reuters, which both cite his LinkedIn profile. Before Binance he worked at rival exchange Kraken, according to the same profile as cited by both outlets.
The dates do not quite line up. January 2022 to November 2026 is a little under five years, while Yi He spoke of “more than five years at Binance”. Ng may have joined before he took the CFO title, or the figure may be rounded; neither the statement nor the reports explain the gap.
His public footprint is small. Binance is a private company, so a change of finance chief comes with no securities filing, no auditor’s letter and no disclosure schedule. The exchange’s reserve updates after the hack also came from its co-CEOs: The Block reported on 2 November that Richard Teng announced the latest proof of reserves verification on X, and that Yi He put the time needed to generate the zero-knowledge proof at 40 to 50 hours after the snapshot.
Justin Yek moves from Airwallex’s finance team
Reuters describes Yek as a longtime finance executive whose most recent job was vice president of finance at Airwallex, a payments company. His arrival there is on the record: Airwallex announced in February 2023 that he had taken up the newly created post of head of strategic finance and corporate development, reporting to chief executive Jack Zhang.
The same release credited him with more than ten years in banking, finance and start-ups, including work for Morgan Stanley and Citi, without dates for those jobs. Airwallex said at the time that he would work on company strategy and potential acquisitions with chief executive Jack Zhang.
His career as Airwallex and Reuters describe it runs through banking, payments and start-ups, with no crypto company named. That is a different trade from running the treasury of an exchange that has just covered a multibillion-dollar loss from its own funds. Binance has not said why it chose him.
Binance leadership changes since December 2025
The CFO handover adds to a run of moves at the top of Binance. On 3 December 2025, Teng announced at Binance Blockchain Week in Dubai that co-founder Yi He would become co-CEO alongside him. On 6 April 2026, Bloomberg reported that chief compliance officer Noah Perlman hoped to leave later in 2026 or in 2027, citing a person familiar with the matter, and that several senior staff in sanctions, investigations and financial crime monitoring had left, PYMNTS relayed. Binance replied that Perlman had “no exit date, no identified successor” and that the other departures reflected “natural turnover and performance management”.
On 12 May, Binance confirmed that chief marketing officer Rachel Conlan would leave on 15 June after about three years and stay on as an adviser during the transition, Yellow reported. Eowyn Chen, who had run Trust Wallet since 2022, took over on an interim basis while Binance looks for a permanent CMO.
Taken together, that is a year of turnover at the top, not evidence of a single cause, and nothing in the reporting ties any of these moves to the October hack.
What the Binance CFO change means for users
A chief financial officer at an exchange like Binance runs the company’s own money, which is the money now standing behind customers after the hack. Binance said it had replenished about 95% of the affected assets with its own funds by 2 November, The Block reported. Binance also said, as quoted by TechCrunch, that it “will bear the financial impact of the stolen funds. These losses will not be passed on to users.”
Neither statement depends on who holds the finance job, and the CFO change does not alter what Binance has promised. For users who want to check those promises, the main public tool remains the exchange’s reserve reports, explained in our glossary entry on proof of reserves, along with what such a report cannot show about liabilities.
The market barely moved. BNB, the token of the Binance ecosystem, traded at about $695.70 around 05:38 UTC on Sunday 8 November, up 0.15% over 24 hours and down 1.10% over seven days.
French customers have a more pressing Binance deadline: the exchange is telling them that their accounts close on 31 December, with a fee from 29 November on crypto left behind. The exchange’s fees and safeguards are set out in our Binance review.
Open questions: Ng’s last day and Yek’s first
The next facts to look for are simple ones Binance has not given: the date Ng leaves, the date Yek starts, and the name of Ng’s new venture. A record of the six-month plan, such as a board decision or an internal announcement dated before the hack, would settle the question the timing raises.
For now the whole record is one company statement, sent to Bloomberg and relayed by other outlets. Ng has not commented in the coverage, and the statement ends with Yi He wishing him “the best in his next chapter”.