The Fight for Financial Inclusion with Mary Beth Buchanan

My guest today is Mary Beth Buchanan, an experienced legal, compliance, business executive and trusted strategic advisor to the CEO and Board of Directors. She currently serves as President, Americas and Global Chief Legal Officer for Merkle Science. Founded in 2018, Merkle Science is the next generation predictive cryptocurrency risk and intelligence platform that helps crypto companies, financial institutions, and government entities detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activities involving cryptocurrencies. Merkle Science’s proprietary Behavioral Rule Engine enables our tools to go beyond blacklists, so that compliance teams may fulfill their local KYC/AML obligations and can stay ahead of bad actors attempting to utilize their platforms for illicit activities. Mary Beth Buchanan brings over three decades of legal and business expertise at the intersection of federal law enforcement, global inter-agency cooperation, corporate compliance, digital assets, and emerging regulatory frameworks. Her unique combination of prosecutorial experience in the U.S. Attorney’s office, ethics and reputational risk assessment for the UN, and focus on internal investigations, corporate compliance, SEC enforcement matters, Congressional investigations, and her digital currency work in private practice make her uniquely suited to her role at Merkle Science and a leader in crypto compliance, regulatory and legal matters. We discuss the importance for regulatory clarity, how crypto empowers financial inclusion, dispelling misconceptions about crypto, understanding the mindset of prosecutors and much more. We begin our conversation by discussing how the perception of crypto has changed over the years. Mary Beth does an excellent job at demonstrating how the regulators' views on crypto shifts when they understand the technology better. She states one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is getting the regulators to understand the permanent nature of transactions on the blockchain. Our conversation transitions slightly to discuss how