Following the Money is a Q&A series that spotlights how Chainalysis customers use our products in the real world — from compliance teams and investigators to pioneers driving crypto adoption.
Prashant Kalia is the Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Flutterwave.
1. What do you think sets a great investigator apart from a good one?
A great investigator, in addition to thinking like a bad actor, understands the normal usage of the underlying product/technology and is able to discriminate between them while carrying out their investigations
2. How do you explain “I build systems that track illicit flows and scammers online” at dinner parties?
As technology enables financial inclusivity, there are bad guys that use it to harm individuals and society at large. My job is to be smarter than them to understand the technology and uncover all their crimes via the digital trail, and protect the vulnerable individual and society.
3. If you could automate one part of your job, what would it be?
I’m actually working on writing an AI Agent on this. I aspire to read each and every email I get and all the slack messages. Even though there may not be any call for action for me, there is a trove of information in them that I’m interested in. However, this takes a lot of time and effort. I want an Agent to digest all of this information at the start or end of the day and summarize it for me based on my interest areas and role/responsibilities.
4. What’s the fastest you’ve ever traced something with Chainalysis?
We use Chainalysis primarily to assess the risk of crypto business for which we provide on-ramp services. In general, this is quite a fast assessment. The only thing that may take time is to assess the drivers of the risk for the crypto business in case it lies in the gray area of our risk appetite.
5. What are some of your learnings in building a crypto compliance organization within Flutterwave?
If you are building a crypto compliance org in a non-crypto native company, the first step is educating your stakeholder about fundamentals of the technology infrastructure (blockchain, Web3, etc.) and the risk/financial crime vectors to make them understand how your controls would discriminate the good vs. bad flows. That takes time.
Also, in terms of building the team, you want to look for people who, in addition to the functional knowledge of risk/compliance, should also have either experience with crypto or a deep passion about it. Without that, it becomes really hard to get them to start contributing immediately.
6. If you were onboarding someone who came from a TradFi company, what’s the first lesson you’d teach?
It’s about learning the crypto ecosystem, technology, products, the evolution of Web1 to Web2 to Web3, the socio-economic value proposition of why crypto grew, some of the risk/compliance fiasco, and how the industry/regulatory bodies reacted. I would actually lend them my copy of “Read Write Own” to read.
7. Who’s someone in the crypto compliance world you admire, and why?
I have huge admiration for Vitalik Buterin. I know that most people don’t think of him as a crypto compliance professional, but I have read a lot about him and actually seen him talk in a number of forums about compliance and ecosystem risk topics. You can admire how much knowledge he has on these areas and how it has influenced his design choices in the Ethereum roadmap.
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The post Following the Money with Chainalysis: 7 Questions for Prashant Kalia appeared first on Chainalysis.
