Wachsman, a global communications-based strategy consultancy, announced the appointment of Danny Phan as Chief Strategy Officer. For the past 18 months, Phan has served as Wachsman’s Managing Director for Asia Pacific, leading the regional headquarters in Singapore in order to bolster its presence across ASEAN. Phan’s new role marks the first C-suite appointment since Wachsman, an Inc. 500 recipient this year, was founded in 2015.
An award-winning communications veteran, Phan is equipped with more than 20 years of experience across emerging markets in Asia Pacific and the United States. To date, Phan has advised some of the world’s leading tech companies, including Southeast Asian ride-hailing giant Grab, American online platform marketplace Airbnb, and the Asia Internet Coalition on policy and regulatory communications. In this new global role, Phan will have extended management responsibilities across all regional headquarters and will be responsible for spearheading Wachsman’s global growth strategy, including the expansion of the firm’s intellectual property, service offerings, talent strategy, as well as cross-border client mandates.
Danny Phan, newly-appointed Chief Strategy Officer of Wachsman, said: “Over the years, the communications industry has been conditioned to accept and espouse the corporate principles of businesses in sunset industries. As we begin this new chapter as an organization, I’m thrilled to take on this role as we continue to play our part in serving and supporting a new generation of clients who are uncompromising in their fearlessness to upend the status quo. While our clients may be distinguished by the bleeding edge tech that they bring to the table, what truly sets them apart is the ethos that drives them.”
Prior to joining Wachsman, Phan was the Regional Managing Director for Teneo Singapore and Southeast Asia and previously held senior leadership roles at Burson-Marsteller and Ogilvy. Throughout his over two decade tenure in the communications industry, Phan has received multiple accolades, recognized as “Young PR Professional of the Year” at the Asia Pacific PR Awards and included in Campaign Asia’s “40 under 40.”
David Wachsman, Founder and CEO of Wachsman, said: “Now in our fifth year of operations as the leading name in blockchain communications and consulting, we’ve bore witness to a great deal of growth and change. Wachsman was honored in 2020 to have been listed by Inc. Magazine as one of the 500 fastest growing private companies in America. To stay agile, we’ve established a new guiding vision to anchor our future as a firm that specifically caters to business leaders shaping a new world order. Danny has the extraordinary combination of brilliance, vision, and management expertise to lead a sophisticated organization in the next stage of our journey, as we continue to progress as a company and as a consultancy.”
Since its inception as a public relations firm, Wachsman has since evolved as a consultancy, broadening its service offerings to include policy and regulatory affairs, organizational and change management, as well as risk issues and crisis mitigation. With Phan at the helm of the Singapore office’s operations, Wachsman has taken on mandates from organizations distinguished by aggressive transformation agendas, such as KBZ Bank, Myanmar’s largest private commercial bank; Singlife, a digital insurer creating an interconnected financial service for Singaporeans; and R3, a leading enterprise blockchain platform.
“With rapidly climbing rates of digitalization, a young, mobile-first generation, and a progressive policy-making agenda, Southeast Asia is fast bridging its digital divide. As technologies continue to mature and regulations follow suit, we’ve seen Asian tech unicorns making a significant impact in their communities and across the globe. It’s clear that we’re beginning to see the rise of the ASEAN age. Distinguished by their diversity, ambition, and love of innovation, there needs to be a firm that specifically caters to these types of leaders and it is my belief that firm is Wachsman,” added Phan.
Situated across some of the world’s leading fintech innovation hubs in New York, Singapore, and Dublin, Wachsman has served as a trusted advisor to some of the world’s most innovative startups and organizations. This includes cutting-edge distributed ledger technology projects including Cosmos, Hedera Hashgraph, Stellar, Blockstack, Chainlink, Cardano, and Dash; leading cryptocurrency and digital asset exchanges including Kraken, Bitfinex, tZERO, and eToro; and educational, regulatory, and institutional bodies such as Chamber of Digital Commerce, HM Government of Gibraltar, and National University of Singapore’s School of Computing.
