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      Sonja Davidovic

      Sonja Davidovic

      Senior Digital Expert on Transformative Technology

      International Monetary Fund

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      Sonja Davidovic is a Senior Expert for Digital Assets at the International Monetary Fund, where she shapes capacity development and policy advisory work on digital assets, cross-border payments, and the implications of agentic AI for the future of payments and financial infrastructure.
      In 2024, Sonja concluded her secondment from the Monetary Authority of Singapore to the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub Singapore Centre, where she led the Centre’s digital asset program. She served as product owner for Projects Mariana, Mandala, and Rialto - major international initiatives focused on CBDCs, cross-border payments, compliance-by-design, and next-generation financial market infrastructure. In this role, she coordinated multidisciplinary teams spanning central banks, international organizations, commercial banks, and technology partners.
      Prior to her work at the BIS Innovation Hub, Sonja was a Market Infrastructure Expert at the European Central Bank, where she contributed to the digital euro investigation phase and broader work on payment systems and digital currency infrastructure.

      Sonja holds an MA from University of Bonn and an MSc from Georgetown University.

      Speaking At

      • 1:30–3:00pmTue 17 NovPublic-Private RoundtableRoundtable Room 3Invite-Only

        Global Frameworks, Interoperability & Shared Best Practices

        Programmable Compliance: Which Rules Travel with the Money, and How?

        Public-Private RoundtableRoundtable Room 3Invite-Only

        About this session

        As money becomes programmable, across central bank digital currencies, tokenized deposits, and stablecoins, a real question is emerging about where compliance should live: embedded directly in the asset as a rule that travels with it, layered on top through richer messaging and real-time screening, or enforced separately by whichever party touches the transaction last.

        Players are all building credible but different answers in parallel, and none has converged on how these should interoperate across jurisdictions with different compliance regimes. The stakes are rising on every front — real-time cross-border settlement, tokenized securities, and increasingly, autonomous agents initiating transactions on their own — all of which need a compliance check at the moment value moves, not after. What would each of these approaches to programmable compliance actually need to interoperate, and which rules win when they conflict across borders?

        Discussion questions:

        1\.         Should compliance logic live in the asset itself, in the messaging/settlement layer, or in a separate real-time screening service, and does the answer change depending on whether it's a CBDC, a tokenized deposit, or a stablecoin?

        2\.         When a transaction crosses borders, whose compliance rule actually governs — sender's jurisdiction, receiver's, or the rail's — and what happens when they conflict?

        3\.         Retrofitting compliance onto existing settlement infrastructure and building it in from scratch are both live strategies right now — what would each need to prove to become the default, and is convergence between them actually possible?

        4\.         As more transactions — including those initiated by autonomous agents — require a compliance check the moment value moves, what are the minimum interoperability standards needed for rules to actually travel with money across rails?