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Collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, came to infamy 10 years ago as a hallmark of the global financial crisis. Now, Citi wants to once again become the dominant player in this $70 billion market.

Bloomberg News reports that Jia Chen, a 35-year-old director at the bank, has spent two years between New York and London hawking synthetic CDOs to potential investors — and promoting returns as high as 20%.

Chen’s no newcomer to CDOs, either. While still relatively young by industry standards, the "numbers-focused wonk with an uncanny understanding of the ins-and-outs of structured credit," has spent her entire career at Citigroup after graduating from MIT, according to her LinkedIn profile. 

Ten years after the recession, low volatility in financial markets coupled with near-zero interest rates have left investors looking for higher returns, at the expense of much higher risk. CDOs, which bet on the performance of mortgage-based products, among other things, can provide this.

A Citi spokesperson reiterated that the products were fundamentally different — and thus safer — this time around because "every part of a synthetic CDO deal is distributed to investors."

The bank returned to the CDO market in 2013, but demand didn't pick up until 2015. Today, the products make up about $100 million in revenue annually, or just 0.5% of Citi's total income.

Check out the full Bloomberg story here.

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NOW WATCH: RAY DALIO: Bitcoin is a speculative bubble

-Dragonchain is a blockchain protocol originally built by Disney.

-It's designed to be more private than other popular blockchains like the bitcoin and ethereum protocols.

-Now some of the developers behind the technology want to build a commercial business to make it easy for less technologically savvy businesses to get involved.

From animatronics to digital animation, the Walt Disney Company has long been a pioneer in emerging technology. And blockchain technology is no exception.

In 2014, Disney's tech-focused Seattle office started building what's now known as Dragonchain, a blockchain protocol designed to allow for more data privacy than is possible on other enterprise-oriented blockchains like Ethereum. The idea was to develop a secure asset management system to be used internally.

However, Disney dropped the project in 2016 and decided to make it open source. Soon after, a group of former Disney employees founded the Dragonchain Foundation, a non-profit which manages upkeep of the protocol.

Now, they're looking to build a commercial business — called Dragonchain Inc. — on top of the platform to help other companies quickly and easily start using blockchain.

But first they need to raise money to do so. 

Gap in the market 

It's commonly believed in blockchain circles that the technology could some day make up an entirely new infrastructural layer of the internet, replacing traditional contracts and payment systems used in industries like law and real estate, because the design of the technology makes it difficult to commit fraud.

This promise has drawn in research and development funds from industry powerhouses including IBM and Cisco, which have joined various unifying organizations such as Hyperledger and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance to better understand how this new technology can be leveraged commercially. 

But many large corporations, such as Disney, have been hesitant to put their own data on public blockchains because the design would leave much of their proprietary and sensitive data open to prying eyes. The hope for Dragonchain is that other companies feel the same way. 

Joe Roets, now CEO of Dragonchain Inc., was one of the engineers behind the original project at Disney. 

"Disney was very forward thinking and wanted to know how people use different tech," Roets said. "We started building things. It took two years to build out the platform, give or take."

Roets described Dragonchain Inc's platform as a "turn key" product, which makes it easier for companies to build what they want on top of the Dragonchain blockchain protocol, without investing in expensive and hard-to-find technological expertise. 

Roet said that while it is possible to build security and encryption on top of a public blockchain, it's a costly and time-consuming project. With Dragonchain, the encryption and obfuscation is built in.  

"We realized some of the real world problems are that companies have access to traditional engineers, but they don't necessarily have a crypto background," Roets said . "If you go even further into blockchain, you need an economist or a game theory expert."

More private than ethereum 

Like the technology behind the cryptocurrencies bitcoin and ethereum, Dragonchain is a digital ledger that uses complex algorithms to document transactions in a way that cannot be easily modified. Every blockchain contains a complete history of everything that has happened on it, which makes it harder for fraud to occur in financial transactions. Unlike the public bitcoin and ethereum protocols, however, Dragonchain is a hybrid. This means some information is private, and some is public. 

"The main difference would be that with ethereum or any public blockchains, your data is out there," Roets said. "You can do certain things to obfuscate your data. You could encrypt it. But it won't matter in 10 years or 20 years."

While Disney originally built the project as a private blockchain, this method doesn't have the same authenticity benefits as a public of hybrid protocol. Having some of the data public is key to making the technology effective in protecting fraud. That's because the ability to spread data across a decentralized network is a key component of authenticating the validity of transactions. The blockchain usually requires consensus from multiple companies and computers in order to make a change to the blockchain's history. Theoretically, this makes it difficult for solo actors to delete receipts for their own benefit.

Initial coin offering

Whether or not Dragonchain Inc. is able to move forward with its commercial ambitions depends a lot on how things go over the next month. 

From October 2 to November 2, Dragonchain Inc. will hold an initial coin offering (ICO), also known as a token sale, to raise money for the company. Around 238 million tokens, which the team calls "dragons," will be available for sale to the public. 

"Disney has no involvement in Dragonchain’s initial coin offering," a Disney spokesperson said. 

ICOs are an increasing common fundraising technique in the blockchain world. Companies like Dragonchain Inc. offer up a select number of tokens that can be purchased with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum. The tokens can be exchanged for goods and services within the blockchain platform. On its website, Dragonchain describes dragons as "tokenized micro-license for interaction with Dragonchain commercial platform services."

While tokens are not currencies, they can be traded on token exchanges for higher or lower cash value than they were purchased for. Not every investor necessarily wants to use services within Dragonchain. Some may see it as an investment that could generate gains in the longterm. 

Those that do want to use the service will have access to three different commercial products. The first is a developer-friendly platform for building new projects on top of Dragonchain. There's also a marketplace that has a library of pre-built smart contracts and features to make the building process faster. The company will also fund an incubator for teams that want to develop projects on top of the protocol. 

Several companies are already working on Dragonchain to develop new tools and businesses.

Look Lateral is an Italian fine art site which is using Dragonchain to create proof of authenticity for the art that it sells on its platform. Some pieces of art on the site cost over $100,000, so the blockchain will function as a way of paying for art, as well as a record of ownership. In the art world, this is referred to as "provenance."

Another company called LifeID is working to build a secure identity platform on the blockchain. This would allow to verify that they are who they say they are in digital and physical spaces, without relying on state-issued IDs, or corporately-owned social media, like Facebook profiles. 

Dragonchain Inc's ICO begins October 2nd. 

SEE ALSO: The creator of Ethereum thinks blockchain tech could steal business from Visa in a 'couple of years'

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NOW WATCH: How the US could prevent a North Korean nuclear strike — according to a former Marine and cyberwarfare expert

• JPMorgan launches the second year of its Schools Challenge, a programme to help teach children from underprivileged backgrounds about business and entrepreneurialism.
• The bank hopes that some of the children on the programme will eventually end up working at JPMorgan.
• David Lomer, JPMorgan's co-head of M&A in EMEA, tells Business Insider that the bank wants to recruit from as wide a pool of talent as possible.

LONDON — Think of a British banker and you'll probably imagine a sharply suited white man with a posh voice who was educated at Oxford or Cambridge University. Maybe Bristol or Durham, at a push.

That may once have been the case, but banking and the wider financial sector are changing. Diversity of gender, race, and background is increasing, and the world's biggest financial institutions are making concerted efforts to move away from the stereotypes that have defined banking for decades.

JPMorgan is one of those institutions, and on Friday it launched the second year of its Schools Challenge, a programme designed to help teach kids from underprivileged areas about business and entrepreneurialism, with the hope that some will end up working for the bank.

"What we wanted to do is launch an initiative with students from low-income backgrounds in areas around London, so we could begin a process of interacting with young, bright talent, of all levels and abilities at a younger age than we were previously tapping into," David Lomer, JPMorgan's co-head of M&A in EMEA, and a mentor on the programme, told Business Insider prior to the launch.

For Lomer, the challenge is about ensuring that kids from traditionally socioeconomically deprived backgrounds realise their full potential and don't feel like where they come from dictates where they end up in life.

"We were cognisant of the fact that there's a huge amount of talent that runs the risk of going astray at the 12-14 age group," Lomer says.

To harness that talent in London, JPMorgan is engaging around 150 students from nine schools in the boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Lambeth, Barking and Dagenham, Hackney and Newham, and challenging them to design a campaign, along with a product that could make London a better place. 

The challenge takes place over the course of several months, with senior staff like Lomer mentoring the kids along the way. The programme, in Lomer's words aims to create "a fun, rewarding, engaging, healthy dialogue with kids at that age [12-14]" as it "can be an incredibly fulfilling time to get them engaged and enthused about academia."

The challenge also aims to "inspire them to work slightly harder, and understand that there's a snowball effect of success," where the harder you work, the more opportunities you get.

JPMorgan hopes that some of the children who have taken part in the Schools Challenge will end up on the bank's other youth initiative, the Aspiring Professionals Programme, which helps get older teenagers into finance, offering them mentoring as well as advice on things like CVs and job applications.

Two students who took part in the first year of the programme are now working full time with JPMorgan, while many others have done internships and vacation schemes.

That sort of recruitment, JPMorgan believes, will allow the bank to stand out from its competitors in the future as the financial services landscape gets more and more competitive thanks to the rise of challenger banks and other fintechs.

"We're fervent believers at JPMorgan that over time, as we aspire to be leaders in what we do, if we only recruit from the same gene pool as everyone else, all other things being equal, we will trend toward the average," Lomer said.

"It's incumbent on us to recruit and deliver to our clients, an exceptional set of brains, characters, philosophies and thought processes that are truly distinguished, and aren't just from the same subset of the top five or six universities across Europe, that our competitors are competing against."

Diversity is becoming even more important, Lomer says, when you consider the fact that the bank's client base is also becoming significantly more diverse.

"One thing we're very cognisant of as we try and develop in society, is that our clients are increasingly fragmented and diverse," Lomer said.

"The successful gene pool that we're tapping into is coming from all walks of life. They're global citizens as well, and have come from all sorts of socioeconomic circumstances. We need a talent pool that can talk to those clients."

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NOW WATCH: RAY DALIO: Bitcoin is a speculative bubble

Demand is increasing, alongside criticism, so if you want to get involved in the cryptocurrency then awareness is key. Shane Hickey reports

The boss of JP Morgan was unequivocal about bitcoin at a recent conference in New York: the digital currency was only fit for drug dealers and would eventually blow up. “[It] isn’t going to work,” said Jamie Dimon. “You can’t have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air and think that the people who are buying it are really smart.”

A few days after Dimon’s comments, the value of bitcoin plunged when the Chinese authorities announced a crackdown on it. It has been an eventful month, even in the context of a currency that is less than a decade old. Since the start of the year the value of a single bitcoin has gone from $1,000 (£750) to almost $5,000.

Bitcoin's recent price gains appear to be translating into increased business for a surprising sector of the economy: guns-and-ammo retailers.