Elliptic CEO Says AI Could Overwhelm Financial Compliance Teams

Cryptocurrency security firms are rethinking compliance as artificial intelligence plays a larger role in financial transactions, CoinDesk reported Monday (May 18).

“When you think about agentic commerce, we’re thinking about the sheer volume of transactions and events that need to be monitored as growing exponentially,” said Simone Maini, CEO of blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, per the report.

The problem is that modern compliance operations still depend heavily on manual review, with analysts investigating alerts, tracing wallets and flagging suspicious behavior, she said, according to the report. That system begins to fall apart when financial activity starts happening continuously.

“There simply aren’t enough compliance analysts specializing in digital assets in the world to be able to keep up with these volumes,” Maini said, per the report.

This matters for the crypto sector because stablecoins, tokenized assets and AI-driven payments are increasingly viewed as a source of growth as traditional finance moves into the digital asset realm, the report said. This will require compliance and monitoring systems to scale accordingly.

The report came days after Elliptic raised $120 million to develop what Maini described as an agentic compliance system, AI-powered tools designed to automate transaction monitoring and investigations that would otherwise be too much for compliance teams.

“As transaction volume is growing, cost per alert handling, cost per investigation is falling,” she said, per the CoinDesk report. “For us, what we’re essentially doing for our customers is inverting that cost curve in compliance.”

Meanwhile, cybercriminals are employing the same AI tools that help compliance teams in carrying out their attacks, the report said.

“AI can equip the bad actors with the ability to perform hacks, scams at a scale that they couldn’t do when they were reliant on writers,” Maini said, per the report.

The rise of AI in the financial world could trigger a bank run, and it would not take a “cinematic cyberattack” for that scenario to come to pass, PYMNTS reported Friday (May 15).

“It could start with a wave of account takeovers, false balance information, blocked payment access or fraudulent transfer attempts affecting a visible group of customers,” the report said. “If customers believe their money is unsafe or inaccessible, they may move deposits quickly. If corporate treasury systems or AI-enabled financial agents are programmed to respond to risk alerts, they may do the same without waiting for human judgment.”

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