Speaking at the Financial Crime Summit in Singapore at the Marina Bay Sands was a fantastic opportunity to reflect on my decade-long journey in this space. I started advocating for cryptocurrencies early on, advising governments on digital asset matters as far back as 2017, a time when many dismissed the concept as senseless or scammy. Today, as an investor and author of the upcoming book Web4: The Age of Autonomous Intelligence, my focus is on the convergence of AI, distributed ledger systems, and decentralized technologies, and the unique challenges this creates for compliance leaders like yourselves.
During my closing keynote moderated by Dr. Roger Noon, I wanted to address the immediate realities of our evolving digital world. Traditional financial markets in the US are moving rapidly toward tokenization. While I am not a massive fan of tokenizing every single financial product, there is undeniable money and profit driving this shift. Tokenization expands distribution and makes everything 24/7. This creates a massive burden for the financial crime community. If the market operates around the clock, you must fight crime around the clock. When everything is tokenized, criminals will elevate their game. I advised the banks in the room that if they are moving to private, tokenized ledgers, they must combine everything onto a single graph so it can all be easily traced and tracked. Distributed ledger tech offers near-perfect audit trails, making it a powerful tool for risk and control.
We are facing a critical agility gap in the current landscape. We live in an age of fast-paced innovation, but large institutions and governments remain highly bureaucratic and slow to change. Most of the time, the key vulnerability isn’t the underlying software itself, like the CMS or PHP systems we often blame. It is the big organizations that are simply not fast enough to patch and update their systems.
Bad actors are also innovating at an alarming rate, and traditional guardrails are no longer enough. I shared a personal experience where I was targeted by scammers posing as Bloomberg for an interview on Zoom. They used incredibly realistic deepfakes, rhythm, and tonality to try and hack my laptop and steal my private keys. The sophistication of these attacks is terrifying, especially as we look deeper into the space of autonomous agents. We are deploying AI systems to handle customer service, processes, and operations, but the banking infrastructure is still largely in the dark. Most banks cannot even clearly state what permissions these bots have or how far they can go. The cryptocurrency space is actually a bit further ahead here, using AI linked to consumer trading APIs. To make this work in traditional finance, there is no blanket approach. We must clean up the data and permissions.
To combat these threats, I believe we need a form of technological peer review. Different corporations and governments are building AI in silos, speaking their own languages. We need to sit down and exchange notes. Just as the crypto community comes together after a major hack to ensure the sector stands strong, like when the Bybit hack affected so many, the finance sector must do the same. It is not about copying competitive advantages. It is about sharing notes to keep the space clean and workable.
At the end of the day, my message to the industry is to embrace this technology. Deploy your own bots, understand their limitations, and learn how to adjust. We cannot fear the future. We are entering the era of Web4, an environment where AI and blockchain integration will provide a much safer, more accountable ecosystem for financial institutions. That integration is the key to our future.
Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author. The latest book is Web4: The Age of Autonomous Intelligence.