The finance function in digital assets is no longer just responsible for closing the books.
As crypto businesses mature, finance leaders are being asked to support commercial growth, regulatory engagement, auditability, banking relationships, entity expansion, product launches and investor confidence – often at the same time. The result is a finance function that looks much less like a back-office reporting team and much more like core operating infrastructure.
That was the focus of the Finance Leaders Outlook panel at Crypto Finance Forum London, where Marek Walendowski of EY moderated a discussion with finance leaders from Clear Junction, BCB Group, Bitwise Europe and Copper on how the role is changing, what breaks as companies scale, and what finance teams need to build before institutional pressure arrives.
Teresa Cameron’s own path from CFO to CEO at Clear Junction captured that shift. Moving into the CEO role, she said, “wasn’t actually part of the master plan,” but it reflected how much the CFO role has changed. Finance is now closer to commercial strategy, product decisions, risk appetite and operational resilience.
“The CFO is much more involved in the business. When I first started my career, it was very much a back-office function. In this digital age, it’s very much driving the business forward.”
– Teresa Cameron, Clear Junction
That is especially true in payments and treasury businesses. Clear Junction provides payment and treasury services to financial institutions across fiat and stablecoin rails. For Teresa, that means the finance function is not simply reporting on the business after the fact. It is part of managing client money, company liquidity, FX exposure and the risks involved in running a financial business.
The clearest change across the panel was the shift in market tone. The industry has moved from speed and growth as the dominant metrics to a market where regulation, reporting and control now shape whether a business can win institutional trust.
Philipp Prince described that shift plainly.
“Five, six years ago it was growth at all cost. Roll forward five years, and regulation is absolutely at the forefront.”
– Philipp Prince, BCB Group
But Philipp’s point was not simply that regulation has become more important. It was that compliance can become commercial.
BCB Group, a regulated payments infrastructure business, moved around $230 billion in funds last year, around half through its Blink instant payments network. For a company operating at that scale, Philipp said the lesson was not to fight regulation but to work with it. If the business can show that it is compliant, that becomes a reason customers trust the company.
The practical work behind that is harder than it sounds. BCB spends significant time engaging with regulators across the FCA, ACPR in France, AMF, MiCA-related processes and the UAE, trying to understand where regulators are coming from and shape internal processes without breaking the business model.
Julian Kelly gave another example of how real that regulatory burden can be. Bitwise Europe, formerly ETC Group, issues publicly traded products and is overseen by BaFin in Germany. The firm launched the first centrally cleared, physically backed Bitcoin ETP in Europe, but getting there took persistence.
“We had the first centrally cleared, physically backed Bitcoin ETP in Europe, and I think it took us 15 goes to get the prospectus approved by BaFin.”
– Julian Kelly, Bitwise Europe
For Bitwise, regulatory scrutiny was not something that arrived after the company became large. When Julian joined ETC Group in 2021, the company had around 10 people but was already considered a public interest entity. That meant operating from an early stage against a backdrop of regulator expectations, auditor scrutiny and public-market style discipline.
As companies scale, the pressure on finance teams often builds quietly. Manual processes survive because they appear to work. Teams “get by” until volume, regulation, audit, new entities or product complexity expose the weakness.
Julian argued that finance functions are often treated as cost centres for too long.
“Finance functions tend to be underinvested in. It tends to be viewed as a cost center, a bit of a drag… until the point when it actually simply can’t cope anymore.”
– Julian Kelly, Bitwise Europe
The risk is not only that reporting becomes slower. It is that the finance function becomes unable to support the business when the business needs it most: during regulatory applications, investor due diligence, audits, jurisdictional expansion, banking-partner reviews or product launches.
Nathan Pearman described the role finance has to play inside fast-moving crypto businesses. Copper began as a crypto custodian and has since expanded into areas such as ClearLoop and OTC. In that environment, revenue teams and engineers constantly develop new ideas, new products and new markets. Finance cannot simply block that innovation. But it cannot allow the company to scale on processes that will not survive growth.
Nathan described himself as the “voice of balance”: the person saying that the business can do more, but not forever in the same way.
Philipp made a similar point. Finance should not be the department that says no. But it should make the business pause and ask whether a manual process is worth it. Once something is proved, the next step has to be simplification and automation, otherwise the business eventually loses the capacity to deal with licensing applications, regulatory responses, banking queries and audit work.
Nathan put the challenge more vividly.
“You’ve always got to keep moving. It’s like driving a racing car and changing the engine at the same time.”
– Nathan Pearman, Copper
That is the reality of building a finance function inside a fast-growing digital asset business. BAU does not stop while the company expands into new markets, adds products, hires teams, implements systems and prepares for deeper scrutiny.
One of the strongest lines of the panel came from Teresa Cameron when she described Clear Junction’s business from the inside.
“From the outside looking in, our business is a payments business. But from the inside looking out, our main business is managing risk.”
– Teresa Cameron, Clear Junction
That framing matters because many digital asset companies are described by product category: payments, custody, trading, treasury, stablecoins, asset management. Internally, however, the work is often risk management: client money, liquidity, FX, fraud, custody, controls, regulatory exposure, auditability and counterparty trust.
Clear Junction began in fiat and later moved into both fiat and stablecoin rails. Teresa said that required an education process across the business. Staff had to learn and adapt as the company moved into areas where the rules were still being written.
“We’re quite often working in grey areas of regulation, grey areas of accounting standards, grey areas with tax and VAT. It’s being comfortable being uncomfortable working in that environment.”
– Teresa Cameron, Clear Junction
Her point was not that companies should wait for every rule to become perfectly clear. It was that they need a culture of risk and compliance strong enough to operate responsibly while the market catches up. For Clear Junction, that means applying the principles learned in disciplined fiat management to crypto products and services, so that when regulators, auditors and standards setters arrive, the business is already moving in the right direction.
That same tension appeared in Julian’s comments on Bitwise’s international expansion. Bitwise now operates across the West Coast, New York, London and Switzerland, with different accounting standards, auditors, time zones and cultural expectations. As the group grows, finance has to preserve the company’s original DNA while introducing enough structure, documentation and control to support scale.
That is especially difficult in crypto, Julian noted, because volatility flows directly into the finance function.
“It’s particularly difficult in something like crypto, where everything is so volatile, the P&L can be all over the place.”
– Julian Kelly, Bitwise Europe
As digital asset companies mature, “trust us” stops being enough.
Banking partners, auditors, regulators, investors and future public-market stakeholders need reliable reporting, documented controls, reconciliations and evidence that the business understands its own numbers.
Philipp described IPO readiness as one of BCB’s planning assumptions, even though it is not necessarily the only possible destination. The logic is simple: if the company can hold itself to public-market standards for reporting and governance, it should be ready for almost anything else.
“If we’re ready for an IPO and ready to hold ourselves to the standard of public markets reporting, governance, etc., we should be ready for anything.”
– Philipp Prince, BCB Group
For BCB, that thinking shows up most clearly in banking relationships. Banking partners are critical to the business. To retain high-quality partners, BCB has worked to understand what those partners are likely to ask for, prepare analysis in familiar formats, and respond quickly when questions arrive.
That requires capacity inside the finance team. Philipp said BCB has worked to get routine BAU work done by working day 10, creating more time to respond to ad hoc questions from regulators and banking partners. The aim is not to reinvent the wheel every time a new question arrives, but to build reliable reporting that can be reused, governed and adapted.
Nathan brought the trust point back to first principles.
“Whether it’s regulators or IPOs or an exit, you need to build trust… everything needs to be documented. Everything needs to be followed through.”
– Nathan Pearman, Copper
The wallet environment makes that discipline even more important. When Marek asked how the “cash is king” principle translates when assets sit in wallets rather than bank accounts, Nathan pointed to reconciliation. Copper holds significant assets under custody, and client balances are reconciled to the blockchain every minute.
That level of traceability is essential, but it also creates a new kind of control environment. Engineers, finance, legal and compliance all have to be able to explain how the infrastructure works, how balances are tracked and how client funds are protected.
The final section of the panel turned toward what comes next. Automation was a recurring theme, but Philipp pushed the discussion further by bringing AI into the finance function.
His first use case was practical: financial statements. Group and subsidiary statements can be run through AI to identify inconsistencies across documents. The result is not a finished answer, but a better input for the finance team to review.
The bigger opportunity, however, is forecasting.
Philipp argued that traditional forecasting can be too static. A finance team might multiply three inputs together to project next month’s revenue, or prepare two or three standard IPO-style sensitivities. But in a digital asset business, the variables are more dynamic: Bitcoin price, trading activity, liquidity, client behaviour, market events, jurisdictional changes and regulatory timelines can all affect the outlook.
“Classic IPO work will look at two or three sensitivities. Well, why stop there? Get the AI to work out which variables, which inputs your business is most sensitive to.”
– Philipp Prince, BCB Group
His longer-term goal is a “real-time, live, reliable, accurate, back-testable forecast” that can help the CEO, investors, auditors and regulators understand how the business may perform under different conditions.
Teresa pointed to another use case: compliance screening and fraud detection. In a payments business, AI can help identify patterns of behaviour, surface anomalies faster and support real-time risk monitoring.
The common thread is that AI becomes most valuable when the finance team is no longer trapped in low-level manual work. If automation can free teams to focus on analysis, disclosure, forecasting and risk interpretation, the finance function becomes more strategic – not less.
The panel made one thing clear: finance teams in digital assets cannot afford to wait until the business is already under institutional pressure.
By the time a company is applying for licenses, expanding across jurisdictions, onboarding banking partners, preparing for fundraising, considering an IPO or facing deeper audit scrutiny, the finance function needs to have already moved beyond manual workarounds.
The firms that scale best will be those that build finance infrastructure early: consistent data, reliable reporting, documented controls, automated reconciliations and the ability to answer difficult questions quickly.
In digital assets, finance is no longer just reporting what happened. It is helping determine what the business can safely become.
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