Steven McWhirter

Global Policy Lead

Binance

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Steven McWhirter is the Global Policy Lead at Binance, bringing over 25 years of extensive experience in regulation, policy, strategy, supervision and structural reform. Before joining Binance, Steven spent almost a decade at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). During his tenure at the FCA, Steven was a policy subject matter expert, contributing to UK and international policy development via the ESMA, EBA, EIOPA, BIS, FSB and IOSCO. His policy work included fintech, bigtech, professionalism, management body corporate governance and suitability, systems and controls, operational risk, internal governance, operational resilience, cloud outsourcing, cyber, digital markets and related technology policy.

Steven has previously advised on the creation of the UK Office for Professional Body Anti-Money Laundering Supervision (OPBAS) and the creation of the UK Banking Standards Board. He was also a member of the policy team responsible for implementing the UK’s Senior Manager and Certification Regime (SMCR), as well as the FCA’s lead on managing the UK Privy Council, UK Royal Chartered professions and the Secretariat of the Global Financial Innovation Network (GFIN), a network of over 80 financial regulators and observers globally.

Speaking At

9:00–10:30amTue 17 NovPublic-Private RoundtableRoundtable Room 1Open
The Scaling Challenge in Tokenized MarketsSovereignty & Resilience in a Rewired Financial System

Designing for Resilience in Digital Money Infrastructure

Public-Private RoundtableRoundtable Room 1Open
About this session

As digital money infrastructure matures, more institutions are converging on the same handful of providers for custody, reserves, and connectivity. This concentration brings real efficiency and security benefits but it also creates correlated risk: a single provider's failure, outage, or reserve issue can propagate across multiple institutions at once, often in ways that aren't visible until it happens.

This session brings regulators and industry together to examine what resilient design actually requires as tokenization scales and the market consolidates, across technical redundancy, structural safeguards, transparency of dependency chains, and governance during a shared-provider failure. This roundtable aims to produce a set of principles on where responsibility should sit across the chain(s).
2:00–3:30pmTue 17 NovBoardroomBoardroom 1Invite-OnlyModerator
Others

[Invite-only] When Finance Becomes Machine-Operable: Governing the Convergence of AI, Tokenised Assets and Digital Money – Powered by Binance

BoardroomBoardroom 1Invite-OnlyModerator
- Steven McWhirterGlobal Policy LeadBinanceModerator
About this session

Financial innovation is moving beyond the adoption of individual technologies towards an interconnected architecture in which AI systems can increasingly make or support financial decisions, tokenised assets and rights can be understood and operated by software, and digital forms of money can enable programmable, near-real-time settlement.
These developments are largely being considered through separate policy and regulatory frameworks. This closed-door boardroom will examine what changes when intelligence, assets and settlement begin to converge, and whether existing approaches to accountability, financial regulation, market infrastructure and cross-border coordination remain fit for a financial system that is becoming increasingly machine-operable.
If you would like to be part of the discussion, please register your interest here, subject to approval.

Speakers

Steven McWhirter

Speaking At

Designing for Resilience in Digital Money Infrastructure

[Invite-only] When Finance Becomes Machine-Operable: Governing the Convergence of AI, Tokenised Assets and Digital Money – Powered by Binance