Malcolm Wright

Malcolm Wright is currently working as an independent Financial Crime Compliance advisor, as well as Chief Compliance Officer for one of the largest global virtual asset exchanges.

His compliance career began with Thomson Reuters where he oversaw the delivery of Thomson Reuters’ Anti-Financial Crime (AFC) solutions that enable regulated entities to uncover sanctions, PEP, and financial crime risk. There, he also sat on the leadership team that delivered the world’s first Know-Your-Customer utility before leading the Anti-Money Laundering and Fraud transaction monitoring business units.

Malcolm later joined Revolut, a UK FinTech challenger bank, as Chief Compliance Officer where he took a greenfield compliance function and rebuilt it into a robust organisation that could scale with the company’s global expansion plans.

Following Revolut, Malcolm’s compliance career then took him to Hong Kong where he first built the compliance function for Equonex, the first crypto firm to be listed on Nasdaq then later taking the position in October 2020 of Chief Compliance Officer at 100x, the group that owns and operates the BitMEX exchange.

Malcolm now undertakes independent advisory engagements both in the UK and internationally to educate and transform public and private organisations.
Parallel to this work, Malcolm has championed global AFC initiatives. This has included sitting on the research advisory committee of the Future of Financial Intelligence Programme, a body of work that falls under the RUSI Centre for Financial Crime Studies.

Malcolm now speaks and writes internationally on the future of compliance, the role of public / private partnerships, big data and the fight against financial crime, financial crime risks in emerging technologies, Regulatory Technology (RegTech), and other topics that provide a vision of a future where financial crime is tackled efficiently and effectively.

Against this backdrop, Malcolm is passionate about the reasons why this fight is important and the true human cost from terrorism, human trafficking and slavery, drugs, weapons, corruption, and environmental damage.

Earlier in his career, Malcolm held technical positions in retail and investment banks, and ran his own successful digital agency until 2011.

Malcolm holds a first degree in Business and IT, and the ICA International Diploma in Anti Money Laundering. He is Advisory Council Chair and AML Working Group Chair at Global Digital Finance, a crypto industry body, as well as Chair of the Practitioners Advisory Board at the International Compliance Association.