FMA applauds decision by VFSC to hire world-renowned crypto consultant
It is with great pleasure that the Financial Markets Association of Vanuatu (FMA) learned that our regulator, the Vanuatu Financial Services Commission (VFSC), has hired Loretta Joseph to become its digital asset regulatory framework consultant.
Spanning a 25-year career in global financial markets, the Australia-born expert appears to be the perfect choice to guide Vanuatu toward sensible regulation of promising technologies such as cryptocurrencies, blockchain and decentralized finance.
With an impressive track record in multiple asset classes and emerging market environments, Mrs. Joseph started focusing on the regulation of digital assets from 2012, the year she bought her first Bitcoin. She quickly became a sought-after consultant as she helped regulators devise policies in Antigua, Australia, Bermuda, Jamaica, Mauritius and Serbia. Since 2017, she’s worked with the OECD on a number of policy papers and served on an advisory board for the FATF. A latecomer to computer coding (she started in her forties), she jokingly refers to herself as “probably the oldest person in crypto”.
Not only does Loretta Joseph have relevant expertise to help advance the safe and efficient use of digital assets in Vanuatu, but she also acts as a bridge between FinTech professionals, financial regulators, and the broader business community and government leaders.
Members of the FMA Committee recently had the pleasure to take part in a VFSC training session where Loretta Joseph showed her skills for outreach by explaining complex ideas with ease. Her presentation (see below) gave the opportunity for people who are not too savvy with either tech or finance to understand what digital assets are all about, and what’s in it for Vanuatu.
Her conclusion speaks volumes on the opportunity of digital assets for Vanuatu.
If you look at World Bank, the IMF, the OECD, everyone says this thing isn’t going away. The emerging world will lead the rest of the world in the adoption, as they already do in Nigeria and India among others. Anybody can be an entrepreneur now; anybody who has access to a computer can teach themselves to code. (…) Regulators, government, industry, everybody has to work on the same side, because we’re all on the same learning curve. Nobody has all the answers. If we work together in collaborative way, the next decade will be very exciting.
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