Varlam Ebanoidze

Head of FinTech Development & Innovation Office

National Bank of Georgia

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I am someone who spent the first half of his professional life at banks’ internal audit, Operational/Cyber Risk and Compliance domains. In the second half of my professional life, I re-invented and developed myself towards a FinTech innovator and change facilitator.

Prior to joining the National Bank of Georgia (NBG) where my focus is a Countrywide FinTech, Open Finance strategy and regulatory design, I held senior positions at banks in Georgia and in Ukraine, and served on the management board of a leading retail bank (Liberty) in Georgia.

I am passionate about the Strategic Transformation of Central Bank to “Fit” the new paradigm of Open Finance.
Master’s degree from London Business School (LBS) specialized in Strategy and Leadership, combined with the domain experience allows me to see and suggest the efficient digitization strategies through industry development lenses.

Most recently, my team and I came up with the concept of “FinTech in Georgia; building on the Middle Corridor Momentum”.

Speaking At

1:30–3:00pmTue 17 NovPublic-Private RoundtableRoundtable Room 2Open
The Scaling Challenge in Tokenized MarketsGlobal Frameworks and Shared Best Practices in Payments Chains

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

Public-Private RoundtableRoundtable Room 2Open
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?

Speakers

Varlam Ebanoidze

Speaking At

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