Virtual Currencies, Cyber-Payments and Regulatory Compliance

Why Should You Attend :

Virtual currencies allow individual consumers, for the first time in history, to make payments and move funds securely, completely outside of the traditional financial system. In recent months, there has been a lot of hype about the risk of virtual currencies, but not much explanation about how they work and what the real risks and also societal benefits are. The unique features of Bitcoin and its brethren, including the absence of a central control and its purported anonymity (not really true), are attracting both an increasing number of users around the world and the attention of regulators, who are afraid that they might be used to evade taxes, launder money, trade illicit goods or abuse consumers.

In this session, regulators, executives and risk managers will have the opportunity to learn how Bitcoin and other digital currencies work, what the true risks are and what can be done to both manage the risks and exploit the opportunities.

Knowing the internal workings of these currencies and the risks and opportunities they present will give you an edge to you as a professional and to your financial services institution.

Areas Covered in the Webinar:

• What virtual currencies are and how they work
• An introduction to cryptography and math-based
• The definition of terms such as e-wallet, blockchain, pseudonymity, hashing and mining
• An overview of the current legal status and characterization
• An overview of the ground-breaking FinCEN Guidance of March 18, 2013
• An overview of two law enforcement precedents that could slow down the evolution of virtual currencies: the E-Gold and Liberty Reserve cases.
• The opportunities for societal welfare presented by this new value-transfer system
• The consumer protection, financial crime and legality concerns expressed by regulators
• Tools and techniques to manage the risks posed by virtual currencies

Who Will Benefit:

• Compliance Officers
• Risk Officers
• Internal Auditors
• Operational Risk Managers
• Transaction Monitoring Specialists
• Staff with roles and responsibilities in compliance and risk management departments, as well as businesses and technology departments.

Instructor Profile:

Juan Llanos, is co-founder, EVP and Compliance Officer of Unidos Financial Services, Inc., an innovative financial services and technology provider catering to merchants and under-banked end consumers in the US. Mr. Llanos is responsible for the formulation and execution of the company's technology strategy, as well as its AML and compliance risk management infrastructure. A Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS) since 2003, he previously was Chief Compliance Officer of Remesas Quisqueyana, Inc. in New York City. In 2008 he was awarded permanent resident status by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services by reason of extraordinary ability in the fields of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT).

He is a member of the Bitcoin Foundation's Regulatory Affairs Committee, and writes about risk and virtual currencies in his blog ContrarianCompliance.com.

Topic Background:

Bitcoin is the world’s first successful global digital currency and open-source payments platform. The Economist explains in an April 2013 article: “Unlike traditional currencies, which are issued by central banks, Bitcoin has no central monetary authority. Instead, it is supported by a peer-to-peer computer network made of its users’ machines, similar to the networks supporting BitTorrent, a file-sharing system, and Skype, an audio, video and chat service. Bitcoins are mathematically generated as the computers in this network execute increasingly difficult number-crunching tasks, a procedure known as Bitcoin “mining”.

Bitcoin is a platform that facilitates, on a global scale, the issuance and transfer of a currency, a commodity, a store of value, an asset class, a financial instrument and an experiment in cryptography. In the coming months and years, virtual currencies are poised to change financial services and financial crime surveillance as we know them.

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