Paxos taps ex-Facebook exec to head compliance team
New York-based exchange and stablecoin issuer, Paxos said Thursday it appointed Carolina Ceballos as its first dedicated chief compliance officer.
According to a blog post, the company is tapping the experience of Carolina, who joins the firm following decades working for both banks and regulatory bodies. She comes to Paxos from social media giant Meta, formerly Facebook, where she was deputy chief compliance officer at Facebook Payments.
Carolina has held compliance roles elsewhere, including at Western Union, HSBC and Lazard, amongst other big names. She also served as a regulator with the French Supervisory Authority.
The appointment of Carolina is apparently part of an ongoing attempt to undo regulatory red flags with regulators determined to bring order to the crypto world. She will be tasked with leading Paxos’ legal affairs, as well as strengthening its global compliance, investigations, and law enforcement coordination activities.
Carolina has nearly two decades of experience in regulatory and criminal enforcement. Over the span of her career, she has provided counsel on sensitive operations, complex investigations, litigation, policies, and programs spanning a wide scope of law enforcement and operational issues.
“Carolina joins Paxos with more than 15 years of experience in the field, having provided strategic leadership to teams responsible for developing, implementing and enhancing compliance programs at Facebook Payments (Meta) and Western Union among others. She brings a deep knowledge of the international regulatory frameworks having served as a regulator with the French Supervisory Authority (ACPR),” the company said.
Paxos’ status as a licensed financial services company in the US allows it to offer different products, such as crypto trading and settlement, and custody services. Further, the firm can issue tokenized securities and also its customers to access the traditional banking system.
The unique position has enabled Paxos to sign big enterprise clients, such as Interactive Brokers, Revolut, Crédit Suisse, Société Générale and StoneX. It has also joined forces with the world’s most influential crypto exchange, Binance, to secure the NY regulator’s approval to launch a USD-backed stablecoin.
Carolina comes to Paxos after Facebook tried and failed to launch its own cryptocurrency that was supposed to be used to send money online to anyone in the world.
Facebook Inc. and its partners were redesigning the proposed cryptocurrency to ensure that Diem is not being built to compete with sovereign currencies or interfere with monetary policy. The changes were apparently an effort to woo reluctant global regulators and rebuild momentum for the plan, which ultimately didn’t see the light of day.
More than two years after it was first announced, crypto-friendly bank Silvergate Capital bought the assets of the Diem Association, which runs the Facebook-backed cryptocurrency venture for $182 million.
