Interview With Alex Batlin, Fintech and Digital Assets Expert

Alex Batlin is a London-based fintech and digital assets leader with more than 25 years of experience across institutional finance, emerging technologies, crypto custody, and regulated digital asset infrastructure. He currently serves as an Executive Advisor at Noda, supporting the company’s strategic expansion into blockchain-enabled financial products and providing guidance on compliance, architecture, and digital asset market dynamics.

Alex is best known as the Founder & CEO of Trustology, a pioneering institutional crypto custody platform that secured FCA registration and was acquired by Bitpanda in 2022. Following the acquisition, he became Managing Director of Bitpanda Custody and later joined the company’s board as a Non-Executive Director.

Before entering the crypto industry, Alex held senior innovation and technology leadership roles at UBS and BNY Mellon, where he led global programmes focused on blockchain, emerging technologies, digital currency research, and enterprise R&D. He also co-founded the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, helping establish early industry standards for enterprise blockchain adoption.

Today, Alex advises high-growth fintech and digital identity companies, including Bitpanda and Sumsub, bringing deep expertise in crypto infrastructure, regulated custody, and institutional digital finance.

How Did You Get Into The World Of Online Payments?

My interest in online payments grew out of my work in crypto. At the time, I was leading the UBS London FinTech Lab, and there was a lot of noise around how blockchain and crypto would “disrupt money.” I felt that before judging whether something was truly disruptive, it was essential to understand how the existing system actually worked.

What struck me very quickly was just how complex global payments really are. Behind what looks like a simple card payment or bank transfer sits a dense web of interconnected networks, clearing systems, correspondent banks, and settlement processes. Like many people who dig beneath the surface for the first time, I was surprised by how much coordination is required to move value reliably at scale.

Online Payment Processors Process Billions Of Transactions Per Day – What Are The Biggest Challenges With Online Payments?

The core challenge is ensuring that payments never become the point of friction that stops business from happening. That friction can take many forms: speed, cost, reliability, availability, or simply ease of use.

There’s a strong correlation between cheap, reliable payment rails and economic growth. Countries with trusted, low-cost payment systems tend to have higher GDP and more vibrant commercial activity. The difficulty lies in delivering those outcomes consistently while integrating with a large number of banks, networks, regulators, and infrastructure providers, all operating under different constraints.

Payments are invisible when they work well, but extremely visible when they fail. Designing systems that operate at massive scale, across borders and time zones, without becoming a bottleneck is the ongoing challenge.

How Are Digital And Online Regulatory Frameworks Changing And Why Do They Need To?

The most significant shift is the emergence of stablecoin payments running on blockchain rails. Crypto activities have been regulated for several years, largely through anti-money laundering frameworks, but we’re now seeing much more comprehensive, purpose-built regulation.

In Europe, the MiCA framework has recently gone live, providing a clearer and more harmonised approach to crypto assets. The UK has chosen a different route, folding crypto into an updated Financial Services and Markets Act. In the US, proposals such as the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts are moving in a similar direction.

Taken together, these developments pave the way for near-instant, fully settled, 24/7 cross-border payments. If adopted at scale, this has the potential to fundamentally disrupt correspondent banking, which remains slow, expensive, and operationally complex.

Will AI Help Or Hinder Online Compliance And Regulations?

In the short to medium term, I expect AI to be a net positive for compliance and regulation. It can significantly improve monitoring, pattern detection, and operational efficiency.

My concern is longer-term. AI is already starting to replace junior compliance roles, which historically form the pipeline for future senior experts. If that pipeline disappears, we risk a situation where, in a decade or two, there are fewer people capable of critically challenging automated decisions or understanding when models are wrong.

Given that much of today’s AI relies on large language models, this also raises questions about who will validate outputs, address hallucinations, and train systems to recognise new attack vectors. Without human expertise developing alongside AI, compliance could become more fragile rather than more robust.

Places Like The UAE Have Regulators (Like VARA) Specifically For Digital Assets. What Do Western Governments Need To Do To Keep Up?

Western governments need to make a clear shift from wealth preservation to wealth generation. The structural advantages that many Western economies enjoyed for decades have largely eroded. Playing it excessively safe may protect existing capital, but it also risks long-term stagnation.

If current trajectories continue, future generations may see declining living standards unless governments become more comfortable with calculated risk. That doesn’t mean deregulation, but it does mean accepting that innovation carries the possibility of failure alongside the potential for growth.

Practically, this requires regulators to operate with higher risk appetites, acknowledging that some harm may occur, while recognising that the alternative is a slow but almost certain erosion of economic competitiveness.

How Can Regulators Ensure Regulation Doesn’t Stifle Innovation And Digital Growth?

If regulators move towards a less risk-averse posture, risk management must increase rather than decrease. The key is speed and clarity.

Regulators need to be faster in explicitly saying when something is allowed, reducing uncertainty and lowering barriers to entry for new businesses. At the same time, they must monitor outcomes more closely and be prepared to intervene quickly when real harm emerges.

In other words, lighter upfront friction paired with faster, more responsive oversight tends to work better than heavy pre-emptive restrictions that block innovation before it can even be tested.

What Are The Biggest Advantages When It Comes To Dealing With Digital Assets?

Digital assets combine logical centralisation with physical decentralisation, which makes them unusually robust.

Traditional banking relies on synchronising multiple segregated databases. For example, a payment requires funds to be atomically debited from one bank’s system and credited to another’s. This introduces complexity, latency, and points of failure, with limited transparency across systems.

Blockchain-based systems maintain a single logical view of asset ownership, removing the need to constantly reconcile databases. Settlement can be extremely fast, while resilience is achieved through replication across many nodes. This combination fundamentally changes how value can be moved and verified.

How Has Banking, Digital And Traditional Transformed In The Last 5 Years?

While blockchain often gets the most attention, open banking has arguably had a larger day-to-day impact on payments. By opening access to banking infrastructure, it has enabled new business models, increased competition, and reduced costs for consumers and merchants.

There has also been a push towards broader access to central bank accounts and real-time gross settlement systems, which further improves speed and efficiency. These changes are less visible than crypto headlines, but they have reshaped the practical economics of payments.

Which Types Of Companies In Fintech Are The Most Underserved By The Industries That Can Help Them Grow (Marketing, Compliance Etc)?

From my personal perspective, crypto companies have historically been underserved by traditional banking. Something as basic as opening a business bank account has often been a major hurdle.

The situation has improved somewhat, but access to core financial services remains uneven. Until that gap is fully addressed, many otherwise viable companies will continue to face unnecessary friction simply because of their sector.

What’s Next For You?

I’m excited to see how crypto continues to evolve as it moves closer to the mainstream. There is still a significant gap between the technology’s potential and its everyday use, and I hope to contribute to closing that gap in a meaningful way. I am looking forward to contributing to that story.