Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority CEO: Finance's AI future moves at the speed of its slowest regulator

Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority CEO: Finance's AI future moves at the speed of its slowest regulator explains how the CEO of the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority argues that AI will reshape financial oversight, but regulation infrastructure will determine how quickly it changes in practice. The article says regulators are both being transformed by AI and acting as gatekeepers for how AI benefits reach the industry. It contrasts uneven starting points across jurisdictions: Tier 1 banks invested for more than a decade and spent billions on regulatory technology, yet results were mixed, while compliance surveys show budgets and staff rising with only linear productivity gains. It notes that large-language-model adoption in 2023 led to experimentation but limited production use in compliance-critical workflows, due to the high cost of regulatory errors. The piece also says virtual assets require “genuinely new” supervision methods, including on-chain audits, real-time monitoring and programmable compliance. It references McKinsey’s 2024 projection of $2 trillion in tokenised financial assets by 2030 and the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá, in testing with seven central banks and more than forty institutions.