Julie L. Williams, who was twice Acting Comptroller of the Currency, is joining Anchorage Digital Bank's board, the company said Thursday. This will be Williams' first board position at a non-public company. She ran the OCC from April 1998 until December 1998 under Bill Clinton, and from October 2004 until August 2005 under George W. Bush.
"Julie is someone a lot of the industry has looked up to for a long time," said Nathan McCauley, CEO of Anchorage Digital Bank, in an interview. "In her time there, she was very well respected in terms of her legal opinion and understanding of what does and does not belong in the regulatory perimeter."
Industry observers agree that Williams was respected as a regulator.
"Julie is a very careful lawyer and quite conservative," said Todd Baker, a senior fellow at the Richman Center for Business, Law and Public Policy at Columbia University and the managing principal of Broadmoor Consulting. "When she ran the OCC she did a good, careful job. She's open to new things, but she's very by the book in terms of risk management and compliance."
The announcement comes as San Francisco-based Anchorage Digital Bank continues to
In 2021, the OCC told Anchorage Digital it needed to improve its compliance controls and procedures for the Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money-laundering requirements. In April 2022, an OCC consent order said the bank had failed to adopt and implement a compliance program that adequately covers those areas.
Anchorage has been investing in compliance people as well as anti-money laundering controls, transaction monitoring and other technology fixes, McCauley said.
"We have 30 engineers working on our system to bring all those tools together and really have a rock-solid system," he said.
Anchorage provides custody for digital assets. It started out as a
Williams is interested in working with Anchorage Digital Bank because she wants to help shape it, McCauley said.
"Anchorage Digital Bank is the first of its kind to have a bank charter and hold crypto assets in a trust capacity, and that's very novel and in some ways it's very boring, because hey, we're just holding assets," he said. "But it's also very interesting because it's taking two different worlds — the world of decentralization and the world of banking — and bringing them together. Julie has an interest in pushing forward on what ought to be inside the banking regulatory perimeter. That's what drove her to be interested in working with us."
Baker pointed out that Anchorage could be a beneficiary of the Securities and Exchange Commission's
"The custody business should be enhanced by the prohibition against self custody that the SEC is proposing for non-regulated entities," Baker said.
