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Hosted by
Karin Keller-Sutter
Federal Councillor & Head of the Federal Department of Finance, Switzerland
Dr. Bernhard Gehra
Managing Director & Senior Partner, New York
BCG
Dr. Bernhard Gehra is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group based in New York, where he leads BCG's North American Risk & Compliance Practice. He previously led BCG's global Non-Financial Risk and Compliance teams for several years.
With more than 20 years of experience in regulation, digital assets risk, compliance, and non-financial risk, Bernhard has steered more many risk and compliance transformation programs for large global companies. His work also includes large-scale digital strategy implementation for digital assets compliance and risk processes.
Bernhard is the author of several books and articles on regulation, AI compliance, risk management, the digitalization of core processes, operational risk strategy, and risk governance. Prior to joining BCG, he was a manager at a global financial and securities services firm in Munich, London, and New York, and a research assistant at the University of Munich. He holds a doctoral degree from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in computer sciences and information systems and studied as a research assistant at the London School of Economics.
Speaking at
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4:00–5:30pmThu 25 JunGFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 3, Ground FloorOpen
Securing the Future
Defending the Chain: Financial Crime in a Tokenized System
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Ariadne PlaitakisDeputy Director, Regulation, Policy, & ResearchGates Foundation
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Dr. Bernhard GehraManaging Director & Senior Partner, New YorkBCG
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David RiederPolicy AdvisorSwiss State Secretariat for International Financial (SIF)
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Dean SovolosChief Legal OfficerB2C2
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Patrick GreenChief Compliance OfficerBanking Circle
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Sandra BlagaAI Industry Solutions LeadSwift
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Wee Siang LeeExecutive Director (PDS), Head of APAC CompliancePaxos
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Daniela BarbosaGeneral Manager, Decentralized Technologies, Linux Foundation & Executive DirectorLF Decentralized TrustModerator
About this session
Blockchain has created a new attack surface - from bridge exploits and mixer obfuscation to cross-chain layering that outpaces the tools regulators were given to fight it. As institutional capital flows onto on-chain infrastructure, the stakes of getting AML, sanctions screening, and transaction monitoring wrong have risen sharply.
This session brings together compliance leads, blockchain analytics practitioners, and regulators for an unfiltered conversation about what financial crime looks like in a tokenized system, what the current toolset can and cannot catch, and where the industry needs to move before the next major exploit exposes the gap.
Participants will examine the specific failure modes: how privacy-enhancing technologies complicate sanctions screening, why cross-chain bridges remain the highest-risk chokepoint in institutional flows, and what travel rule compliance actually looks like when assets move between permissioned and public infrastructure. The discussion will also touch on how intelligence is shared - or not - across institutional networks, and what it takes to make that collaboration work at scale.
The roundtable will also confront a harder structural question - whether the AML frameworks inherited from fiat finance are architecturally capable of governing a system where settlement is atomic, pseudonymous, and borderless by design, and what a purpose-built compliance regime for tokenized markets would need to look like.
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