FCA hiring crypto experts as new rules set in

The Financial Conduct Authority has been recruiting people with crypto expertise across both junior and senior pay brackets. According to the regulator’s website, jobs range from policy specialists, as part of a newly established wholesale crypto policy unit, through to junior data analysts in digital assets.

Global regulators have been getting closer to drawing up a complete set of rules for the crypto sector. In October, European Union lawmakers overwhelmingly voted for the start of formal bloc-wide laws to regulate markets in crypto-assets.

Following that, global watchdog the Financial Stability Board made a set of sweeping recommendations to the G20, Barron’s reported. These included breaking up big crypto companies that offer a wide range of functions, such as lending, custody and brokerage, as part of one entity.

In the UK, the FCA is still in its recruitment and learning stage and it had invited crypto firms to attend a “crypto spirit” – a day-long event designed to better educate staff on how the sector works as they decide how to police it. The new job postings have all come in the past two months and were set for workers based in London, Edinburgh and Leeds.

Earlier this year, Rishi Sunak, who was then the chancellor, positioned the UK as a “global hub” for the industry, saying the UK was “open for crypto businesses”. Richard Fuller, the economic secretary to the Treasury, appointed last July, has reiterated the government’s commitment to that goal.

But companies are still worried about the slow pace of the FCA’s registration process for crypto firms wishing to carry out regulated activities in Britain and the subsequent effects on the “crypto hub” ambition. One chief executive recently said that it took his company eight months to be assigned a case officer after initially submitting an application in 2021, and a whole year to be fully registered.

Another CEO, Serhil Zhdanov, of crypto exchange Exmo, said the company submitted its application on 1 September, but had not been assigned a case officer until six weeks later. He described the process as “a bit slow”, and added that the regulator had not told him the assessment would take six months – despite the applications online dashboard saying it would take only three months.

“Sometimes it feels like there is a huge gap between what is being announced by the government and what is actually being done by regulators,” he said. His comments echoed those of Binance (a cryptocurrency exchange which is the largest in the world in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies) co-founder He Yi, who said that the UK was the “most stressful” country from the perspective of crypto regulation.

Yi, who now leads Binance’s venture capital arm Binance Labs, puts the firm’s regulatory woes down to it being a young company with “just a few hundred people globally” at the time of application – one without enough UK-based staff with backgrounds in compliance. It was also “not professional” in the language it needed when applying for a licence, she said, adding that the UK has “high standards” for regulatory approval.

A spokesperson for the FCA said: “Crypto remains a growth (area) for us and this is why we are recruiting at pace.”

Regarding the lag when it comes to onboarding new crypto firms, they said: “We have seen multiple issues with the applications from firms seeking registration, including poor applications and inadequate systems and controls, which has led to increases in registration times.”

They added: “We will work with firms to help them as much as possible through the process. The FCA supports innovation. That is built on ensuring firms meet our standards, providing consumer and investor confidence.” (The writer is our foreign correspondent based in the UK)