FCA’s Jessica Rusu discusses Russian sanctions and regulating cryptocurrency

Jessica Rusu, Chief Data, Information and Intelligence Officer at the FCA, spoke at the Innovate Finance Global Summit, the flagship event of UK FinTech Week, where she discussed Russian sanctions, regulating crypto and the focus for the FCA.

Her key points included:

  • Russian sanctions: “To support the UK’s economic sanctions against Russia, we have engaged with impacted firms to set out our expectations for compliance with the sanctions. Against the backdrop of the ongoing pandemic and climate crisis, the role of data technology and innovation and preparing for the future has never been more important.”
  • Crypto assets: “Another area of ​​growing attention is the rapidly landing planning of crypto assets and their underlying distributed ledger technology. Our consumer research shows that over 2 million people in the UK are invested in crypto assets. Our research also shows that younger investors are attracted to crypto asset, and that an aspect of gaming associated with crypto has contributed to the risk of harm to consumers in this space.”
  • Financial fraud: “In September, we’ll hold a joint tech sprint with the payment systems regulator on authorized push payment fraud, which increased dramatically during the pandemic. In fact, nearly half a billion pounds were lost to fraud in 2020 alone. The tax break will be focused on exploring solutions to identify and prevent push payment fraud, for example, through the identification of suspicious social media, advertising, and scam promotions. These initiatives demonstrate our focus on being proactive and leveraging innovation to inform our future strategies.”
  • Launch of Innovation Pathways: “Innovation Pathways is a new service that combines and enhances our direct support and advice unit services, to provide innovation and the support provided alongside our regulatory sandbox, to establish and high growth oversight initiatives. This extends supervision support firms that are scaling at speed as well as those that are new to regulation, taking the recommendations further and covering both the startup and scale up stages.”

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