Copper has become the latest crypto firm to beef up its compliance team, appointing finance veteran Tim Neill as its new chief risk officer.
Neill joins the crypto custody provider with more than 20 years’ experience in risk management roles.
He was most recently chief risk officer at Mastercard, and has held senior roles at the London Stock Exchange Group, where he was group head of operations and technology risk, Standard Chartered, where he was head of global service operations, and Deutsche Bank, where he was global head of incident management.
Crypto companies like Copper are rushing to improve their risk and compliance capabilities, ahead of what is widely expected to be a regulatory crackdown in the coming years.
In April, Binance poached senior regulators from the Financial Conduct Authority and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
READ Binance hires new compliance boss for US arm
Last year, recruiter Hamlyn Williams said it had carried out 18 chief compliance officer searches for fintech and cryptocurrency businesses in 2021, up from seven in 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Copper brought on former chancellor Philip Hammond in an advisory role in October 2021. In the US, Electric Capital, a crypto venture capital firm, recently named former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Jay Clayton as an adviser.
Copper is expected to announce the closing of a roughly $500m funding round in the coming weeks, which includes Barclays as an investor, according to a Sky News report.
Neill said it is “a critical time for risk and compliance in the crypto asset ecosystem”.
“I look forward to applying my digital finance security management experience at Copper to help ensure institutional investors and asset managers can continue to transact and store cryptocurrencies transparently and securely.”
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