Building Trust in Digital Identity: Tackling AI Fraud and Regulation

So let's start with your path because it's quite an interesting one.

You began your career like in public policy and financial regulator, then being on the regulator side, you moved to Plaid where your job was to convince regulators to change their minds, and then to Yodlee running open banking and compliance, and then the UK entity itself.

And now you're at some subplots on the board of Financial Data and Technology Association.

It looks like regulators and fintechs, then global compliance platform and governments.

At every stage, it looks like you've been working around the same question.

Like, how do we create rules to protect people without stopping innovation? Does it feel like a fair description of your career?

I would say definitely.

It feels a lot more organized when you explain it like that.

I think there was, I'm the first person to admit I did not, I was not five years old telling my parents I wanted to be a financial regulator.

I very much fell into it.

I'm very happy I fell into it.

I absolutely loved it.

And it's been really interesting to, as you said, Maria, to go from kind of being in the regulator, actually writing the rules that impact everyday consumers to then going, as we always joke, going to the dark side and going to the public sector.

I would say it's very much, it's not the dark side.

It gets too much of a bad rap, but it's been really unique, I think, to come from that perspective of, okay, I'm just going to write the rules.

And then the biggest thing that I actually found that I didn't understand was I'm sitting here writing these rules that are But you don't fully understand that genuine impact to the business until you're sitting on that side.

So the biggest actual difference I noticed from when I left the FCA to go to Plaid was all of the rules and guidance and regulation that I had written in my role at the FCA, I then tried to implement into Plaid.

And half of it, I'm like, this doesn't make sense.

This sentence that I know I wrote doesn't make any sense to a business perspective.

So it I think for me, the biggest actual lesson learned has been that the regulators coming from a very specific perspective and then businesses, and even now at some sub, because it's actually my first role where I'm at a non-regulated financial company.

So it's also kind of taught me that the way you interact with regulators, it It has to be very specific.

And it's not like, oh, you need to talk down to them.

It's not that.

It's more, you just need to explain that.

Okay, so if you're going to have a rule that has me do X, Y, Z, what I actually then have to do to follow that rule is A, B, C.