Every Crime Is a Financial Crime: Inside IRS-CI’s Fight Against Illicit Finance with Chief Guy Ficco

Ari Redbord (00:02):

I am Ari Redbord and this is TRM Talks. I'm Global Head of Policy at TRM Labs, we provide blockchain intelligence software to support law enforcement investigations and to help financial institutions and cryptocurrency businesses mitigate financial crime risk within the emerging digital asset economy. Prior to joining TRM spent 15 years in the US federal government, first as a prosecutor at the Department of Justice, and then as a Treasury Department official where I worked to safeguard the financial system against terrorist financiers, weapons of mass destruction, proliferators, drug kingpins, and other rogue actors. On TRM Talks, I sit down with business leaders, policymakers, investigators, and friends from across the crypto ecosystem who are working to build a safer financial systemOn this episode of TRM Talks, I sit down with S Criminal Investigation Chief Guy Ficco, but first Inside the Lab where I share data-driven insights from our blockchain intelligence team. On today's Inside the Lab, TRM policy team breaks down the White House Working Group report on digital assets, a sweeping roadmap for US crypto policy and regulation.

(01:16):

The report 163 pages, calls on federal regulators, including the Treasury Department, the CC, to use their existing authority to provide clearer rules for digital asset trading for custody and record keeping. It urges regulators to streamline requirements that may be slowing innovation and to ease the responsible adoption of defi and other emerging technologies even in the absence of new market structure legislation from Congress. At the same time, the working group calls on Congress to pass comprehensive digital asset legislation that divides regulatory authority between the SEC and CFTC and directs financial regulators to immediately enable the trading of digital assets at the federal level. The report stated goal to ensure the United States leads the blockchain revolution and ushers in the golden age of crypto stablecoins are front and center. In the report. Even with the passage of the Genius Act, the working group urges Treasury and federal banking agencies to expeditiously implement GENIUS including new AML regulations tied to stablecoin issuance, reserves, and redemption processes.

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On taxation the report recommends the Treasury and the IRS revisit prior guidance on mining, staking, and other onchain activities. It also proposes clarifying rules on corporate alternative minimum tax and de minimist transactions, which could make everyday crypto payments more practical for US users. Finally, the report dedicates significant attention, roughly 20 pages, to elicit finance. It calls for expanded access to blockchain intelligence tools like TRM across DOJ, Treasury, Department of Homeland Security and Financial Regulators, increased funding for AML and sanctions enforcement, and improved interagency coordination on seizure protocols, typology, and cross-border investigations. It also recommends new data sharing frameworks with international partners to prevent regulatory arbitrage and strengthen global cooperation. For more on the White House report, listen to our TRM Talks with Counselor to the Secretary on Digital Assets, Tyler Williams. And now I sit down with the chief of IR Criminal Investigation Guy Ficco. Today I am here with Guy Ficco, Chief of IRS Criminal Investigation. Guy, thank you so much for joining TRM Talks.

Guy Ficco (03:51):

Thank you so much for having me, Ari. Looking forward to having a good conversation with you.

Ari Redbord (03:55):

Really excited to kind of get into CI and the work that you guys do there. We've had a number of different guests over the years from IRS Criminal Investigation and what always really struck me was that such a lean, mean group could be really tip of the spear in so many ways when it comes to financial crime investigation, but really that's the story of your career. Talk to me a little bit about your journey really through the latter at CI up to the highest levels as chief today.

Guy Ficco (04:21):

Yeah, well thank you. I just hit my 30 year mark in federal government and the entire time with IRS from investigation about four or five months ago now.

Ari Redbord (04:30):

Congratulations. I mean that's really extraordinary.

Guy Ficco (04:33):

Yeah, it's one of these things where you look back and in some ways it feels like it was just yesterday I started and sometimes it feels like five lifetimes ago. There's just so much change that has happened, but at the same time, we have this ability to just put ourselves back into a situation and sometimes that's helpful as well. So I grew up outside New York City. My father was a New York City bus driver. I have an older brother, an older sister. Both went to work for the federal government, had multiple family members who were in military service through the years, so I always had a sense of public service and giving back and candidly, even though my sister was an IRS employee, which was a revenue officer, I didn't really know much about IRS Criminal Invetigation growing up into college when my sister was working with the service.

(05:16):

But I had visions of being an FBI special agent, like a lot of other people, and this opportunity, I was an accounting major and this opportunity presented itself, became a student co-op, which essentially is an unpaid intern, well paid intern rather in New York for about a year and then transitioned to the special agent position and really haven't look back about 14 years up in the New York City area. All in field work really never envisioned moving into a management position and there's no way, no way I would've envisioned becoming the chief of the agency. It just sort of happened once I got on that path and was able to get fortunate in some of the opportunities that they were given to me. And it's one of these things and I think most people who are career leaders will say, you never forget being the field agent on the line employee, but the opportunity to influence and hopefully add value to more people and more of the overall scope and efforts of the agency. It just happened and I came along for the ride and thankfully I've been able to ascend up to the Chief position here for about two years.

Ari Redbord (06:25):

That's awesome. 30 years is really extraordinary. I was an AUSA in DC for over a decade and every US attorney that I worked under had been a former AUSA in that office, and I think what that allowed them to do is really sort of understand the day-to-day work and the grind that was sort of happening. Were there things along your journey that really shaped your perspective as Chief today? Sort of seeing the work that's being done in the field by the special agents out there?

Guy Ficco (06:51):

I think that last part, the fact you never forget what the widget is and our widget are criminal investigations and the scope of those investigations have changed. We certainly have been, we've evolved with technology and have had a leadership role I think in some of the really most impactful crypto digital asset cases of recent years, but historically we're financial investigators and never losing sight of that I think has been particularly helpful to me as I've moved up in the organization.

Ari Redbord (07:20):

There is this narrative that IRS is tax collectors and I think people struggle with IRS Criminal that does sort of some of the biggest North Korea cases, child sexual abuse material terrorist financing, and I've talked for so many years with folks like Kirk Peifer and Carlos Orozco and Jarod Koopman and Sherri Arp. Your leadership team is absolutely extraordinary. How does a tax authority end up doing these types of cases and maybe why have you been so impactful in them?

Guy Ficco (07:49):

I think at our core, we're accountants, almost all of us are accountants, so we're financial investigators at least, and tax cases, which is our root and it is our primary mission. Basically every one of those agents that you mentioned there started and spent significant time doing tax investigations, real detailed investigations and really ironing their craft. Once you have that skillset, you can take that anywhere. There's a financial crime and whether that's in money laundering, whether that's in sanctions, whether that's in terrorism, BSA work, you name it. The core foundation of being able to trace money, being able to draw correlations, being able to ask appropriate questions and document and use data all along the way is the foundation of every IRS special agent. That's really, I think why it's allowed us to be so successful across a wide breadth of different types of investigations.

Ari Redbord (08:43):

And I love the history of it. You and I were together recently at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, and what's so cool there to see is like, Hey, we've used financial crime investigations. A colleague of mine at the US Attorney's Office, Zia Faruqui, who's now a federal judge in DC famously said, "Every crime is a financial crime. Every investigation is a financial investigation." This goes back to the Al Capone days. Talk me through how you think about investigating financial crimes that often lead to putting away some of the most violent criminals or in this new world, transnational criminals. Criminals are using cryptocurrency to try to evade detection.

Guy Ficco (09:18):

I think you have to nail that head. IRS-CI has been around for 106 years and Al Capone was one of our first, I think it actually was the first criminal income case that was prosecuted for tax evasion a hundred years ago, but it's still up on the posters. It was such a breathtaking case. I think as I was saying, the foundation is there and that allows us to take our skillset in a variety of different ways, but I think it's important to understand that we evolve and one thing I like to say when I speak to our graduating class, the special agents at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, I have them close their eyes and imagine it's 1995 was the year I started with CI and granted almost no one in the class was alive in 1995, but I have them go through this exercise

Ari Redbord (10:03):

That is crazy. But yes, okay.

Guy Ficco (10:05):

Their parents, I think enjoy this exercise maybe more than them who were in the audience usually, but I say, look, 1995, imagine the technology. And I say, I go back and I didn't have a cell phone, I didn't have a laptop. I used to write memorandums by hand and on a typewriter of a secretary used to type them up. Summonses were like carbon paper, this was antiquated. Fast forward, here we are in 20, 25, 30 years later my career, and look how far we've come in technology and look what we're doing. Then I have them close their eyes again and just imagine what things are going to be like in 20 years or 25 years. Maybe the Jetsons will become a reality, who knows? But I want all of the employees to just leverage that industry because if you don't, you're going to fall behind really quickly.

(10:50):

So I think in terms of our ability to take on some of these other types of investigations, I'm sure we're going to talk a little bit more about crypto cases and the blockchain. Well, when that first came about, I know I was like, my God, it's anonymous. We'll never be able to find anybody just persevering and just having taken a deep breath and working through that process, you realize, wait a second, it's actually quite simple to follow a blockchain. And then working with companies such as TRM and others, we fine tune that. So there's elements of the innovation, public-private partnerships, everything, and just being open to everything I think has allowed our agents and our investigators to be so successful.

Ari Redbord (11:30):

I love it. And let's talk a little crypto, IRS Criminal Investigation has been involved in pretty much every one of the really key crypto investigations out there. I think Welcome to Video, which was the largest takedown of a child exploitation marketplace, the Bitfinex hack, the largest seizure in US history or really probably world history and really so many others, Silk Road, I mean the list really goes on and on and on. Feel free to talk about any specific cases that really resonate, but also why CI has found its way into the most significant cases involving cryptocurrency.

Guy Ficco (12:04):

I think if I want talk cases you open with Welcome to Video to me. If I, again put myself back as a young agent to think that CI agents would be the ones who'd be able to crack that code of human trafficking, human smuggling to save people, these boys and girls and men and women who were being trafficked, that's unbelievable to me. And a 25-year-old me could never have envisioned that CI would've done that. So agents like Chris and others who were so paramount to that success in doing that, it blows my mind. I tip my hat to them and I don't know that I'm ever going to have a case across my inventory that's not necessarily going to resonate with me quite as much as that. I think in terms of why have we been successful, well, I think it goes back to what we've done for 106 years.

(12:53):

We are really good financial investigators and we've proven that over and over and over again, and I don't think that's lost on the other agencies that I don't think is lost on DOJ and the AUSAs who work with us. And because of that, I think most of them, when they get into any type of, there's some aas, even if they see a bank account, they're going to call the IRS, but a lot of them at a point when they see any type of complexity in financial records, it lets get the IRS on this case. Derek Maltz, who was the acting DEA administrator earlier this year, he had a chance to go out to his field office in Chicago and there were some CI agents who were doing on crypto investigations there, and Derek was blown away and he saw me about a week or two later and he just couldn't stop seeking praise on those agents.

(13:41):

And he's like, what do you do? And it's like, wow, we've made this a priority across CI. We've made it. So every CI agent gets crypto training at the academy as part of our course, and we've made it a priority for them to get certain certifications, at least on fundamental skills through different tools, again, such as TRM to advance them. So I think we've got this. There's an understanding that we have the skills and we need to foster it and we need to make it really pervasive throughout the agency, but we're really just building on the same credibility that we have in the financial investigative space that we've had forever.

Ari Redbord (14:16):

I love that answer because it really speaks to sort of each agency when we're doing things at our best, each agency is bringing their very specific skillset. CI are the best financial investigators in the world because they're gun carrying accountants essentially, and every case is a financial crime and you're sort of following the money. There's always this discussion, whether it's on TV or movies, and a lot of it is real about turf wars, but what I've found is in the crypto space, these big crypto cases, if you ever look at the press release these days, it's you on there. It's the head of the field office for the FBI and whatever office is working that thing, it's HSI. It's everyone sort of bringing their skillset here, and that was true in Welcome to Video and Bitfinex and you did a case on the first ever terrorist financing case involving crypto, North Korea. So I do think that's kind of interesting how each agency brings their expertise, and CI is very specific to that financial crime investigation piece.

Guy Ficco (15:09):

Yeah, I think that's right and I think through the years, certainly TV has dramatized it, but there definitely have been cases of turf wars across agencies. I would say by and large IRS, we don't necessarily get into those turf wars. I think those are other three letter agencies that usually end up fighting with.

Ari Redbord (15:25):

Get FBI and HSI in the same room sometime and have this conversation

Guy Ficco (15:28):

Fair enough. But I think that there really is as we've moved on and after 9/11, I think there was a push to try to make some level success, but I think there still was some challenges. I think every generation of leaders coming up I think has been able to maybe take that football down the field a little bit further. The one government approach that has been a focal point of this administration, I think that's one of the foundations of the Homeland Security task forces that have been set up, this one government approach and bringing different agencies together with different skill sets to advance the overall mission.

Ari Redbord (16:00):

I love it. Let's talk about sort of the one approach is, if you will, and that is I think one other unique piece outside of just being having that financial crime expertise is being a component of the US Treasury Department that is doing, OFAC is doing sanctions designations, targeting FinCEN is the financial intelligence unit for the United States. Obviously CI is very, very connected to what's happening at Treasury. I've heard one Treasury thrown around lately in conversation, which I think having spent a couple of years at Treasury working with his components, I think CI could be of huge even more value in the work that's being done there. Talk to me a little bit about the way you collaborate across the US Treasury Department.

Guy Ficco (16:37):

Well, I think you have the nail on the head. We work with TFI, Terrorism Financial Intelligence under Secretary John Hurley. I meet with him regularly. We have people embedded on his team over there at Treasury, and there is a true understanding of the different abilities, capabilities, and skill sets across the different Treasury bureaus. So with PFAC, with FinCEN, there is a foundation of working collaboratively to advance the mission. I'll say one of the priorities, one of my priorities, which is had some really significant success I think this year is something called CI First. I don't know if you're aware of that, but that's a public private partnership CI, and the first stands for feedback in response to strategic threats, and that started out in 2024 as part of some finan exchanges and we were focusing on fentanyl in 2024. We've now pivoted and we've now pushed it to try to work on creating feedback loops to financial institutions and hopefully FinTech to help them through the process of both SAR as well as just sharing information quicker with government and also hopefully getting more utilization, the 314Bs to have companies share with each other.

(17:52):

It's part of a larger push. I didn't say it's a multi-year push. I really hope it becomes something of substance because I think it could be of tremendous value across the government.

Ari Redbord (18:01):

I think the extraordinary at TRM, we're thinking about partnering with the public sector all the time. We're liking to call it public-private disruption because it has to be fast, it has to be real time, and the only way to do that is to work really closely together. Our Beacon Network is an example of that, but really love that. That's a huge focus right now for you. Another huge focus has always been seizure and then ultimately working with DOJ on forfeiture, and it's such a critical piece to all this, right? Because we're not always going to get as much as we want to. As hard as you work handcuffs on bad guys, they're often in Russia or in North Korea or in the Middle East. How do you think about seizure and sort of using those types of tools, working with prosecutors to take funds from bad actors?

Guy Ficco (18:44):

Well, I think you said it earlier, all crime, I guess except maybe crimes of passion are financial crimes. If they're financial crimes, they're being done for greed and for benefit of wrongdoers. So by taking their assets that they've accumulated, we're going to the crux of why the crime was committed in the first place. It's paramount for the deterrent effect. In some cases, it's far more deterrent than the amount of jail time that could be derived, and in some cases, you're only able or to seize proceeds and not able to criminally prosecute. So it's absolutely paramount. I would say also it allows the way forfeiture laws are set up when we work with our local partners, there's ways to get money back through sharing agreements with our locals, and that is very important. We need that force multiplier on a lot of these cases. Some of the big cases that we talked about where the seizure amounts just are mind boggling in the billions and such, those are unbelievably impactful to the government, to the Treasury, and we also get resources to directly support our asset forfeiture program to hopefully do it again and just continue with that determined effect.

(20:00):

So there's no way from my seat, there's no way to look across the agency and look at our priorities and not have seizures, forfeitures and disruptions as being just absolutely paramount to our success.

Ari Redbord (20:15):

It is so impactful. I think about our friend Chris Janczewski's laptop that he sees the 3.6 billion at Bitfinex sitting there in the Smithsonian in the permanent numismatic collection, which we've talked about on the show before. But the reality is it's a cool story, but it's really the impact of that 3.6 billion. We don't have a bitcoin reserve or a crypto strategic reserve yet, but when we do, it'll be largely funded by those types of seizures, which is absolutely extraordinary. Guy, when I have senior leaders on the show, which we're lucky enough to have a fair amount of. One question I love to ask is about leadership style. Somehow you've rose through the ranks, through CI to this role in large part through hard work, but also through leadership and your leadership style. Would you talk a little bit about how do you think of you as a leader?

Guy Ficco (20:58):

As I said earlier, I spent a significant amount of time in the field. I've been to trial, I've multi-month trials and multi-year investigations, and I think that because of that I have credibility with my workforce. I have credibility with colleagues from other agencies as well as the private sector. I think that's been particularly helpful. I think as I said earlier, I never envisioned myself being Chief. I think as such, I never had a multi-year plan to spend a certain amount of time in this job or that job. I just always dedicated myself to the job that I was in. One thing I'll say in terms of meetings and such, I always try to empower every one of the employees, every one of the people underneath me or my colleagues in those meetings to share their thoughts to the point where it almost can be annoying, I think for some, because I'll be calling on people who are maybe sitting in the back bench as to what their thoughts are.

(21:50):

But I think it's important. I've been that junior agent or junior analyst in the back row who maybe had far more insight than all of us experienced people because more engaged on a daily basis, but been in a position where I wasn't empowered to let my opinion be known to the group. So I try really, really hard if you're in a meeting with me, be prepared to talk because I'm going to be looking to find people back there who maybe they don't feel like they've had that empowerment to let their opinions know, and sometimes they've got far more insight than the rest of us.

Ari Redbord (22:24):

Fantastic answer. Let's talk challenges for a minute. When you mentioned when you talk to the graduating class coming in that you think about sort of the future, you think about where we are with technology. When I think about challenges right now for us and for really the world, I think about AI, I think about civilization level threats quite frankly, when bad actors can supercharge ransomware attacks and scams. What do you think about when you think about the biggest challenges that CI is facing today and how do you think about combating those?

Guy Ficco (22:54):

I think you hit the nail on the head. It's artificial intelligence and where that goes into the future. But unfortunately, or unfortunately over the last few weeks and months, had a couple different presentations where people talked about scams and how AI is advancing scams and it's chilling and the scope and the way AI is going to be utilized. I mean, right now, I think in a lot of places you've got individuals, you may have armies of people who are making phone calls or such at some point that's going to pivot to machine learning AI who are going to be perpetrating and advancing these schemes as it is. I think I saw somewhere where it's like three or four seconds of you talking, there's enough audibles in your voice. An AI tool could have you say almost anything.

Ari Redbord (23:43):

You are in huge trouble after this is released. There's no question. No, actually to that point, it's amazing. I did ATM talks maybe six months ago with a professor at US Berkeley named Hany Farid. He's one of the foremost experts on deepfake technology. And Hani came on as me. I mean, basically I'm looking right now in this exact place, and it was really cool for marketing. Our marketing team loved it, but it's absolutely terrifying that to your point, you need a couple seconds, literally what you are doing right now in order to do this, it's harrowing. But then we think about how do we leverage that technology?

Guy Ficco (24:15):

We need to be as aggressive as we can to try to use that technology to combat these frauds, and we need to have continual communication with the public because the public are the ones who are going to be really most at risk of being scammed. And Ari, you and I, in theory, we are pretty sophisticated and it should be difficult to scam us. Doesn't mean they won't get us because there's different ways they can do it, as we just talked about. But I really think about people who have in society who are a little more vulnerable, a little less sophisticated with some technology. It's one of these things as you have crypto or you have advancements in other internet, social media and such, it's good in that it opens up a world of knowledge and opportunities, but at the same time, they're not experts in it.

(25:04):

Whereas maybe 10 years ago, your grandparent would get some kind of communication about crypto. They would immediately, oh, that's science fiction. Now they sort of know what Bitcoin is. That little bit of knowledge can become dangerous because now you've put something on their head, well, that sounds legitimate. And now that's just an opportunity I think for fraudsters to advance and to perpetrate bigger and more quicker scams. And I'll also say, I heard a statistic from a good friend of mine who was talking about with scams, and he's in this industry with scams. They say about 90% of the scam is perpetrated like pig butchering for instance. 90% of the scam is perpetrated before the individual hits send on any money. It's that building up of relationship and nursing that the perpetrators that the scammers have done to the point where the victim believes them more than they ever will law enforcement or even their financial institution. And that to me is terrifying.

Ari Redbord (26:01):

It's a huge challenge for law enforcement. We've seen at TRM about $53 billion in fraud and scam activities since 2023 In crypto, that number is probably 85% larger. Conventional wisdom is that about only 15 or 20% of victims report that might even be low. So we're talking about a global scourge that is occurring right now. I was happy to see the Prince Group take down a couple of weeks ago, $15 billion forfeiture, but AI is supercharging a lot of this activity. But I know that CI is building AI into their workflows using tools, trying to move as fast as the bad actors. So it's a crazy moment. I do have some comfort just knowing the team that you work with and their level of sophistication. But I think it's like you said, I mean it's a crazy moment in world history when we're seeing the speed that this technology is moving.

Guy Ficco (26:48):

And we can't let up. We have to be moving forward and that's going to be a challenge. We talk about challenges, the continued dedication and commitment from all of us, for me and from people above me to put the resources, whether that's financial or human capital resources into this space, is going to be paramount as well as continuing to foster those public-private partnerships.

Ari Redbord (27:09):

I cannot thank you enough for coming on today. I'm going to leave you with one fun question, and that is, I think you're one of the busiest guys out there. If scheduling with you is any indication you are running around all over the world, super busy leading, just an absolutely critical law enforcement agency. But when you do have a little downtime, what do you do to blow off a little steam or relax a little bit or take your mind off of civilization level threats like ai?

Guy Ficco (27:33):

So I was probably a novice traveler before I met my wife. She is a supercharged traveler and she's a planner. So she's got trips planned months and months away, sometimes years into the future. So I think she's got us going to Europe like six times in the next three years to do different things.

Ari Redbord (27:51):

Amazing.

Guy Ficco (27:52):

We'll be in London in a couple of weeks for the Christmas markets and such. So I think that's big. Have a couple dogs running around here at home as well, and they all keep me on my toes and just general, I love sports and just getting the opportunity to sit in front of a TV or sit in front of something and watch, get your mind away from life for a couple hours is always very enticing.

Ari Redbord (28:13):

I love it. Alright, two followup, and maybe we'll have to get your wife on the show, but is she using ai? I have found that that is something that is a great use case for AI right now at chat g bt to say, Hey, I've got 10 days in Iceland. Can you do an itinerary for me? Give me some hotels. It's like, well, that one's a little expensive. And then you go, I'd like a four star hotel. Is she utilizing these tools? They, this is an incredible use case for these things.

Guy Ficco (28:37):

So that's my contribution to the trips. I've much more embraced AI and pretty much everything we do, I throw a query or two in there just to get a sense. She's more old school in the planet.

Ari Redbord (28:49):

I love it. That sounds great. And two sports teams. Who do you root for?

Guy Ficco (28:53):

I'm a big Buffalo Bills fan, so I've gone through years and years and years of suffering there and hopefully one year they'll bring it home from me. And unfortunately on that same chain, I'm also a New York Mets fan and they've also been fairly traumatizing to their fan base for the last few years.

Ari Redbord (29:10):

Yes, you definitely long suffering. So I grew up in Northern New Jersey and I rooted for the Yankees, but I grew up in the era where the Mets were much better. So all my friends, this was the eighties when I was in middle school and high school. So yeah, those were great years. But yes, I agree, although they're, I feel like both of your teams are not in a bad moment. Both of your teams, Josh Allen, got Juan Soto. This is not a terrible downtime for those teams.

Guy Ficco (29:39):

But it almost feels like it's enough of an appetizer to get you excited too.

Ari Redbord (29:44):

Too. It's too close. Cut to right

Guy Ficco (29:45):

Off before you get to the top.

Ari Redbord (29:47):

Yeah, definitely. Sounds like a VS fan for sure. Guy, thank you so much. Really, really appreciate you coming on TRM talks and excited to watch you do even more impactful workout there with ci.

Guy Ficco (29:58):

Thank you very much, sir. I really appreciate it.

Ari Redbord (30:06):

Two really quick takeaways here, and there's probably more that I'm missing. Well, one is something I've talked about for a long time with the extraordinary team at IRS Criminal Investigation. Folks like Kurt Peifer and Sherr Arp, Carlos Orozco, Jarod Koopman. Obviously Chris Janczewski at TRM is just the incredible impact and how much above its weight IRS CI punches compared to the most larger agencies out there. CI has been involved in every major crypto investigation really following the money and being that financial crime piece. And I think it's so important that there's even more work done leveraging those capabilities, these accountants with guns as Chris so affectionately talks about his old agency. I think that's one. Two, I love the conversation about leadership with Guy. I think that the credibility that he gained from doing the work for so long, almost 30 years as a special agent before becoming Chief gives you so much credibility.

(30:59):

But something he said that I wrote down immediately was this idea of always focusing on the job you're in. I know a lot of people listen to TRM Talks for some of the career advice and the career path, but the focus should always be on the job that you're in, right? Be the very best that you possibly could be in that job and that will lead to promotions. It will lead to becoming chief of whatever it is that you're doing. So I loved that. And then I also loved his idea of ensuring that people share their thoughts, empowering those who may have different perspectives or are coming up through the ranks. So this combination of, wow, this small but mighty agency combined with this level of leadership style that's really leaning into having done the work are really major takeaways for me from this conversation with Guy Ficco. On the next TRM Talks, I sit down with the Monetary Authority of Singapore's Chief FinTech Officer, Kenneth Gay. If you love the show, leave a review wherever you're listening to it. Follow us on LinkedIn to subscribe to our newsletter, the Weekly Roundup to get the latest news on crypto regulation, compliance, and investigations.

TRM Labs (32:10):

TRM Talks is brought to you by TRM Labs, the leading provider of blockchain intelligence and anti-money laundering software. This episode was produced in partnership with Voltage Productions. The music for this show was provided by iKOLIKS.

Ari Redbord (32:26):

Now let's get back to building.

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