Compliance at a Groundbreaking Fintech Firm
Tags: Employee Experience, Cryptocurrency, Fintech, Paxos, Compliance

What is Paxos and what do we do? From the news, you might know we power crypto for PayPal, are facilitating U.S listed equities settlement for Credit Suisse, Instinet and Societe Generale, or that we power USD-backed stablecoins for Binance and Huobi.

But Paxos is much more than the headlines we make. We want to give you an inside look on what it’s like to work at a market-leading fintech. Get a better sense of who we are by meeting our people. Here’s a Compliance Officer that is responsible for ensuring our products remain safe and trusted.

How did you learn about Paxos?

A colleague from a previous firm had joined Paxos in early 2017 and told me about the company mission. I was interested in Paxos’ regulatory status balanced with its dedication to fintech innovation. At the time, I was following the crypto world and I was jealous my colleague was getting hands-on blockchain industry experience while I was relegated to just personal crypto trading and reading online articles. We continued to keep in touch and I later made the jump to join him at Paxos.

Why did you join Paxos?

There was a significant pull factor — I wanted to join a team that was truly making an impact on the world with real innovations. I was bitten by the blockchain bug in 2015 and thought this was a once-in-a-century inflection point for a major paradigm shift. I sensed the same passion from Paxos employees.

What was your past work experience?

Prior to Paxos, I worked at a Big 4 accounting firm for 6 years, focusing on anti-fraud/financial crime compliance consulting engagements. I was in the Fraud Investigations unit and did a blend of advisory work on AML/Sanctions compliance, as well as actual internal investigations for companies. I worked on and managed both small and large scale engagements for nearly all the major financial institutions, doing a mix of investigations, remediations, assessments, and look-backs. The work was mostly reactive and we helped financial institutions enhance their compliance programs through our findings and recommendations.

What are your responsibilities at Paxos?

I manage the day-to-day team processes covering all aspects of Compliance. I also work to design and enhance our internal compliance system logic in tandem with external vendors and our Product team. A lot of nights, I go to bed thinking about future threshold tuning and model validations to continuously enhance our Compliance processes.

What do you like about working at Paxos?

Everyone is very smart and passionate, so no challenge is insurmountable. We take action and make decisions quickly at Paxos — this is a place where people get things done. I also like that we’re driven by key objectives so teammates are always unified in reaching the same goals. Because of the speed at which we move, I have the sense that one year at Paxos is equivalent to three years at a traditional institution based on how much people can learn, grow, and execute.

What has been your favorite experience at Paxos?

The entire design and launch process of our stablecoin Paxos Standard (PAX) in mid-2018 is very memorable. Paxos created an entirely new product in the span of a few months. From a compliance perspective, we re-designed and launched a whole new set of systems for customer onboarding, sanctions screening, and transaction monitoring. It felt like you were truly surrounded by friends and you were doing something that had never been done before. We’ve since launched many new products, but this was my first experience with a major product launch. I’ll never forget it.

We hope Ed’s experience has shed some light on Paxos. Stay tuned, more stories to come!