The Real Ingredients of Virtual Compliance ‘Baking-in’ FinCrime good practice from the start

For entrepreneurs in any space there is often a desire to do things ‘differently’. Indeed, that is a prime motivation: to deliver a new product to customers. It can be tempting to focus on getting this right, providing a high-quality customer experience, and stimulating growth, to the exclusion of other concerns. Although compliance, regulation and risk management do not get ignored, they can slip down the list of priorities.

This has undoubtedly been a common challenge in the Virtual Assets sector, where innovators focused on developing new types of asset, product or service have sometimes found themselves dealing with issues of financial crime compliance last - with dire commercial and sometimes legal consequences. In some recent cases, the spread of stronger global AML/CFT requirements for the industry has led firms who did not factor such matters in from the start to go out of business. In other cases, failures to meet regulatory requirements have led to fines and regulatory censure.

If the Virtual Assets sector is to continue its remarkable growth, therefore, entrepreneurs and firms in the sector will need to develop sustainable ways in which to approach core compliance and risk management requirements from the start.

In this session, our panel of experts will consider the ways in which Virtual Assets innovators have addressed these issues so far – successfully and otherwise – and seek to glean learning points for how Virtual Assets firms can ‘bake-in’ good practice, and develop sustainable FinCrime frameworks as an ingredient of long-term success.