MEET THE SPEAKER: VIRGINIA DEBERNARDI – BRIDGING THE GAP: MOVING FROM PERIODIC COMPLIANCE TO CONTINUOUS LEGAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Speaker Name: Virginia Debernardi

What's one thing you hope attendees take away from your session?

I want attendees to leave with the idea that continuous legal compliance is becoming genuinely possible. Regulation changes constantly, but most organisations still manage compliance through periodic reviews, fragmented tools and enormous amounts of manual work. Technology can now connect regulatory change directly to the policies, controls, products and teams it affects, and keep those connections current as the law evolves. That changes the role of the compliance professional too: less time spent finding, tracking and processing information, and more time applying the expertise and judgement that actually require a human. For me, that is where the future of legal compliance gets really interesting.

In one sentence, what do you do and what is your role?

I’m a lawyer, regulatory compliance expert and co-founder of Kalipso, where I focus on turning complex regulation into something financial institutions can understand, implement and continuously manage.

What's the biggest challenge facing the industry in this area?

The biggest challenge is that regulation has become continuous, while compliance is still largely periodic. Laws, guidance and regulatory interpretations evolve constantly across multiple jurisdictions, but many organisations still rely on manual reviews, spreadsheets, disconnected systems and external advice to understand what has changed and what it means for them. The result is a growing gap between the pace of regulation and an organisation’s ability to implement it. Closing that gap (without simply adding more people or more alerts) is the real challenge the industry needs to solve.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone working in fintech today?

Stay close to the actual problem you’re trying to solve. Fintech moves incredibly quickly, and it’s easy to get distracted by whatever technology, trend or buzzword is dominating the conversation. The best products come from understanding the problem in depth, including all the boring and difficult parts, and then choosing the right technology to solve it. Technology should follow the problem, not the other way around.

What book, podcast, newsletter, or resource would you recommend to our audience?

I’d recommend *The Coming Wave* by Mustafa Suleyman. It’s a useful way of thinking about AI beyond individual products or use cases, particularly the tension between technological capability, regulation and our ability to build institutions that can actually keep pace with both. That intersection is becoming increasingly relevant to anyone working in fintech.

What topic will you be speaking about at FinTech Connect 2026?

I’ll be speaking about the future of legal compliance: how technology is allowing us to move from periodic, fragmented compliance processes towards continuous compliance, where regulatory change can be connected directly to the products, policies, controls and teams it affects. I’ll also explore what that means for the traditional risk paradigm. Historically, we measured and managed compliance risk because closing every regulatory gap continuously was simply not possible. As technology makes that increasingly achievable, the conversation can shift from measuring the possibility of non-compliance to identifying exactly where a gap exists and fixing it, while keeping legal expertise and human judgement at the centre.

Just for fun: if you could have dinner with any person, past or present, who would it be and why?

Christine Lagarde. Very few people have operated at her level across law, politics, international finance and central banking. I’d be fascinated to understand how her thinking changed as she moved between those worlds, particularly how you balance legal and institutional constraints with economic reality when the decisions you make can move markets. I’d also love to know what she thinks the financial system will look like twenty years from now, and which of today’s assumptions she believes we’ll look back on as completely wrong.

What industry trend are you watching most closely?

I’m watching the growing fragmentation of financial regulation. Financial institutions increasingly operate across borders, while the regulatory environment is moving in the opposite direction: more rules, more national implementation, more guidance and increasingly different supervisory expectations. Even within Europe, a single regulatory initiative can create very different realities across 27 jurisdictions (think of the CCD2 national transpositions). I think one of the defining challenges for financial services over the next decade will be how institutions remain genuinely global while regulation becomes increasingly complex and local.

Why is this topic particularly important right now?

Because financial institutions are increasingly global, while regulation is becoming more complex, fragmented and jurisdiction-specific. Legal and compliance teams need to understand not only what is changing, but exactly what it means for their business, and the traditional way of doing that simply doesn’t scale anymore.

What's one prediction you have for the next 3-5 years?

My prediction is that, within five years, throwing more people at regulatory change will stop being an acceptable compliance strategy. Only one-third of EU financial institutions currently expect to be ready for the new AML framework by July 2027, despite compliance costs continuing to rise. That tells us the problem isn’t simply resources; the operating model itself isn’t scaling. I think we’ll see financial institutions fundamentally redesign how legal compliance is managed, with far more of the regulatory interpretation, mapping and implementation process built into their infrastructure rather than handled manually.