- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By 
Kyle Brasseur2022-12-06T13:00:00
The more Sam Bankman-Fried talks, the easier it is to comprehend how his crypto exchange once valued at $32 billion could fall apart in a span of 10 days.
The founder and former chief executive officer of FTX has been characteristically outspoken over the past week about what went wrong to lead his company to the Nov. 11 bankruptcy filing that rocked the cryptocurrency world. In a parade of media and speaking appearances—apparently in defiance of his legal representatives—Bankman-Fried has been contrite in accepting the blame for his failings and the damage he’s done.
The sincerity of such an approach will always be questioned, but in taking his words at face value, the biggest surprise might be Bankman-Fried’s exchange even managed to last the three years it did. His discussion of FTX’s approach to risk management during a lengthy interview for “Good Morning America” is enough to make any compliance officer cringe.
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The Federal Reserve Board placed restrictions on Washington-based Farmington State Bank after taking issue with how the liquidating financial institution changed its business plan without seeking proper approvals.
Christy Goldsmith Romero of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission called out gatekeepers—lawyers, accountants, auditors, compliance professionals, and others—for failing customers in the unregulated cryptocurrency market.
A flurry of criminal and civil fraud charges laid against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried have pulled back the veil on the cryptocurrency exchange’s complete lack of internal controls and toothless risk management procedures.
Top-of-mind issues addressed at Compliance Week’s Third-Party Risk Management & Oversight Summit, held June 3-4 in Atlanta, included safe deployment of artificial intelligence, assessing vendor viability and sustainability, understanding the role of procurement in risk ranking, the intersection (or lack thereof) between data privacy and cybersecurity, and many others.
Anne Morriss, co-author of “Move Fast and Fix Things,” advises compliance officers to tap into curiosity, communicativeness, and comfort with discomfort to build organizational trust, fast.
Regulators and government agencies often speak to the value of empowered corporate compliance programs to advancing their mission. Why not practice what they preach by empowering compliance among their own ranks?
