AML Compliance and Crypto with Brendan Cochrane, JD CAMS

09/28/22 • 31 min

AML is a huge issue in the crypto space and with regulatory agencies taking stronger actions the compliance issue is growing every day. Our guest on today's show is Brendan Cochrane, J D CAMS. He is a leading expert on the AML space and focuses his practice on the crypto space.
Brendan Cochrane, JD, CAMS, is a partner at YK Law LLP where he focuses on cryptocurrency and blockchain matters. Brendan is also Principal and Founder at CryptoCompli, a startup focused on the anti-money laundering compliance needs of cryptocurrency and blockchain businesses.
Brendan is a Massachusetts-licensed attorney and Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS) with broad legal experience, much of which he accumulated at international law firms in New York and Seoul. Brendan has also worked as a legal analyst for a Tier-1 Fortune 50 commercial and investment bank where he contributed to the bank's Dodd-Frank compliance program, becoming familiar with each of the bank's lines of business in the process. Brendan's experience includes time in the FinTech space working for a startup cryptocurrency business. There, he oversaw investigations into fraudulent Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions utilizing a leading blockchain forensics analytics tool, and piloted anti-money laundering programs for cryptocurrency Money Services Businesses (MSBs).
Brendan speaks on anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance issues related to cryptocurrency to various professional associations, including the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists, the Association of Certified Sanctions Specialists, and the California Financial Crimes Investigators Association. Speaking topics have ranged from the use of cryptocurrency to evade sanctions, dark web marketplaces and cryptocurrency, central bank digital currency (CBDC's), and the implications of El Salvador's efforts to make Bitcoin legal tender.
Outside of work, Brendan travels every chance he gets, having visited 42 states and 29 countries thus far. When it comes to fall Saturdays, Brendan, a top graduate of the University of Michigan, watches each and every Wolverines football game with great fervor. And lastly, but certainly not least, Brendan enjoys learning Mandarin Chinese from his wife, an accomplished neuroscientist, so that they can make jokes his parents don't understand.

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What Is Lexcon Crypto?? In the premier we answer just that! We introduce the show and discuss why we are doing this show and how we plan to roll it out! We hope that you enjoy!

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Wondering About Kardashian, Elections, Gamefi and Crypto!

Episode 4

Andrew: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to Lex Con Crypto. We're excited that you are here for yet another episode

today, Alex and I are in the studio and we're focused today around this this pesky question that's been bothering us for a little bit. When you're involved in the crypto space, you, you have to do a lot of wonder.

You wonder where this is all going. What's gonna happen next? You wonder what new technology's gonna be introduced what new crime is gonna be perpetrated. There's all sorts of things that, that we speculate and wonder about. And so we thought we would do an episode on just that what is it that we are wondering about this week in relation?

The crypto market and specifically around regulation. Yeah. Did I, you know, is banter going? But we necessarily wanna to split up a [00:01:00] couple episodes for you. One, with what we're watching in the news, what we've been seeing, and two, what we're wondering. Being things that aren't maybe grounded so much in news stories, concepts being put into words, things that maybe are a little bit futurist, maybe overly paranoid or excited on our part.

Alex: But this is the safe space for us to share some of our wonder. And I know Andrew has a couple topics of wonder for us. What do you got?

Andrew: My first thing that I'm just wondering about, I want you to know that it's not wondering at the level of losing sleep at night wondering, but definitely something I think about is.

What is the outcome of this midterm election have on the development of crypto regulation? And of course there are several bills, two in the Senate, three or four in the house that are being closely watched and have [00:02:00] come very close to completion. But just were did not have enough bipartisan support to be able to.

Through to the, the, the House or Senate calendars and to get votes on. And so I'm very, very curious. I'm, I'm wondering how the outcome of the midterm election does power swing from the, from, from Democrat hands in the house to Republican hands. You know, is there a shift in, in the Senate does that usually, I mean, you're, you're a student of political person that it surprises me, like you said, you're not being kept up at night.

Not that level of wonder, but I would say for you, it's not an uninformed, you know, curiosity. I would think that you have a pretty good sense of, Yeah. Republicans are probably gonna take the house. Well, it's, it's a, it's a historical fact that the party. Who loses the presidency wins the midterm election.

It is the, it is the anomaly that the, that the, the party who wins the presidency also wins the midterm. That's [00:03:00] just Do you think, do you think that the wonderment of it for you is the fact that, you know, this is happening, like so many of these things, so many of these unresolved regulatory things in crypto that maybe folks like you and me have been riffing on for a while, seems that we are.