What Can Fintech Expect from the Biden Administration’s Financial Regulators

Fenwick intellectual property partner Andrew Klungness spoke to Protocol about the financial regulations that fintech companies are expecting under the Biden administration.

"The administration is going to be extremely receptive to innovation that can be seen as helping consumers who have been underemployed or underbanked, who have lacked access to the financial system," Klungness said.

He noted that certain policies—such as regulatory sandboxes or other exceptions to rules for fintech or startup betas, pilots and rollouts—would help with innovation within the industry even as regulatory scrutiny increases.

Klungness also told the publication that the Securities and Exchange Commission chair nominee, Gary Gensler, could help provide clarity for the crypto industry on which tokens are securities and which are not.

"The SEC is trying to get closer to this answer of when is a digital asset a security and when it's not," he said. "It's been a specter over crypto for a long time."

In addition, Klungness said that Biden’s nomination of Michael Barr, a former board member at a crypto company, as comptroller of the currency could also bode well for the crypto industry.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has already been extremely crypto-friendly, Klungness said, citing a recent order allowing banks to custody digital assets. "The mainstreaming of crypto was in a lot of ways spurred by OCC."

The full article is available through the Protocol website.