The world’s foremost anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism funding (CFT) regulator shares its second twelve-month review of their revised FATF standards on virtual assets and VASPs.

Former Director of the Southeast Region of the SEC and current advisor to Notabene, Charles V. Senatore shares insight on how crypto firms can approach regulatory regimes, steps compliance officers can take to become an integral part of product teams, and the path from compliance officer to business decision-maker.

Notabene and Elliptic launch a ready-to-use solution that complies with FATF Recommendations to virtual asset service providers (VASPs) and financial institutions (FIs). VASPs and FIs can automate the exchange of counterparty information during cryptoasset transactions securely and privately.

With many protocols on the market, Notabene simplifies travel rule compliance by integrating multiple messaging layers into one platform.In response to the sunrise period, Notabene offers a ready-to-use solution today - TRNow. You can exchange data transfers with any VASP, even if they didn’t implement a solution on their side yet. No need for them to sign up for or integrate with Notabene either!

We’re excited to share that a select group of our Singaporean customers, Luno, Crypto.com, and Xfers, have successfully completed the second phase of Notabene’s Travel Rule testnet. This makes them one of the first VASPs ready to roll out full Travel Rule compliance at scale on their platforms.

Today, we are excited to welcome Rebecca Macieira-Kaufmann and Charles “Chuck” V. Senatore to the Notabene team as our advisors. As a seasoned CEO, Rebecca has scaled financial service businesses to exponential revenue while overseeing the implementation of strong regulatory and risk management controls. While leading global compliance programs at major financial institutions, Chuck worked closely with management teams to align compliance and business goals. He also spent years as a regulator at the SEC. Together, their decades of experience working with complex financial and risk issues will be instrumental in helping Notabene build a best-in-class product and support our community of customers during this critical time.

Luno, a leading global cryptocurrency company based in London with over 7 million customers in 40 countries, has partnered with Notabene, the end-to-end Travel Rule compliance platform. With Notabene’s help, Luno is rolling out Travel Rule compliance starting with Singapore.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recently released its updated guidance on the risk-based approach for virtual assets (VAs) and virtual asset service providers (VASPs). We provide a summary here and share our views on how this may impact the industry.

Over the past year, the Travel Rule has become a critical issue for many crypto businesses. Throughout 2020, companies focused on finding a solution that would allow them to transmit their customers’ data to other crypto businesses in a secure and privacy-preserving way. However, when you take a closer look at the Travel Rule and how its implementation impacts day-to-day business processes, being compliant requires a lot more than just data transmission.

Participating virtual asset service providers (VASPs) are preparing to roll-out compliance with the Travel Rule for the Singapore market as early as April.

Notabene has taken significant steps to meet MAS’s new requirements for technology service providers. Our efforts will help companies streamline the vendor assessment process and allow them to start implementing the Travel Rule quicker.

In the light of our recent fundraising round, Notabene's CEO Pelle Brændgaard shares some thoughts on Notabene today and on our mission. We started Notabene specifically to help regulated companies have the confidence to send and receive more transactions on behalf of their customers. We believe this will ultimately allow broader adoption of crypto and DeFi by everybody and push the technology into mainstream usage.

We are thrilled to announce a significant milestone for Notabene — we have raised $1.765 million in venture capital led by Castle Island Ventures, joined by Green Visor Capital, Lynnet Capital, Dialectic, Pardon Makumbe, and more. This seed round brings our total funding to date to $2.3 million with some of our early supporters including Y Combinator, Signature Ventures, Joachim Sonne, and others.

Merkle Science, a leading provider of blockchain transaction monitoring and intelligence solutions, has partnered with Notabene to help companies dealing with cryptocurrencies comply with the Travel Rule. Notabene is a compliance platform designed to bridge crypto markets with traditional financial systems. The company helps financial service companies comply with new crypto regulations coming into effect such as the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) Travel Rule for virtual asset service providers (VASPs). 

Notabene created a free, public-data directory for all VASPs, regardless of which Travel Rule protocol they support. The directory allows companies to search for counterparties and easily determine which, if any, Travel Rule protocol they are using. It also provides access to relevant business information, helping counterparties build trusted relationships and take first steps towards Travel Rule compliance.

We're excited to announce that Notabene is participating in Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch!

We talk with many compliance officers worldwide, and one of the number one questions we’ve received in the last few weeks is about the US Travel Rule WG. What is it, and will we support it? Most of the information that is available publicly comes from a talk given by Coinbase’s Jeff Horowitz at the recent GDF Travel Rule summit. Through conversations with companies involved, we’ve been able to piece together a reasonably good idea of what it is and also more importantly, what it isn’t. The US Travel Rule WG was designed to allow MSB’s licensed by the US regulator FinCEN to rapidly implement and comply with the US Travel Rule, which is defined in the Bank Secrecy Act.

While the crypto industry has made significant stride toward proposing technical solutions for the Travel Rule, crypto companies still face many challenges when it comes to implementation of the guidelines.

This report highlights a number of issues that regulators and representatives from the private sector have raised during implementation and asked for greater clarity and guidance on them. We have summarized these issues below. To shed more light on these issues and how to resolve, FATF is likely to introduce additional guidance by October 2020. 

In June 2019, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) released a global regulatory framework for the crypto industry. One year later, on July 7th 2020, FATF released a report containing a 12-month review and assessment that measures implementation of these guidelines by jurisdictions and the private sector.

On July 7th 2020, FATF released a report containing a 12-month review and assessment, measuring implementation of these guidelines by jurisdictions and the private sector. The release of the report followed a virtual Plenary meeting held by the FATF on June 24th, 2020. In the review, the travel rule is highlighted as “the issue of most focus in terms of VASPs’ compliance with the revised FATF Standards.” What were the key findings of this review, and what does it mean for compliance teams in the crypto industry? 

In June 3, Malcom Wright, wrote an article about Travel Rule. There he described the “Travel Rule Discovery” problem, which basically means how to know which Travel Rule protocol the beneficiary VASP is using. In the article, the proposed solution is to build a centralized “Global List of VASP” (GLoV). We at Notabene think there is a better solution for this.

Today we are launching Notabene, a new crypto compliance platform for the financial industry. Notabene combines our expertise in financial markets and privacy-preserving systems to enable the industry to solve its most pressing challenge - regulatory compliance. Our platform enables businesses to comply with new financial reporting requirements more efficiently, broadly known as the Travel Rule. These critical requirements are part of the new worldwide regulatory framework for Virtual Assets Service Providers (VASPs) from FATF, the global anti-money laundering watchdog.

The new global Virtual Assets framework as well as the Travel Rule itself are the biggest opportunity crypto has had for crossing the chasm into the mainstream. Lack of regulatory clarity was always the primary stumbling block for crypto adoption and poor links with the traditional financial industry.