19. Mayuri Pandya: Crypto's Critical Window: How UK Firms Must Prepare for the September Gateway

Mayuri leads UK public policy for Bitpanda, and she came to it with eight years inside central government, including time at HM Treasury shaping financial services legislation. She now sits on the Policy Council of the UK Cryptoasset Business Council, and her day-to-day is a mix of things that don't usually sit in the same job description: lobbying politicians, responding to consultations, hosting roundtables in the House of Lords, and trying to change a narrative about an industry that still has a serious perception problem. In this episode, Mayuri gets into what the incoming UK crypto regulatory regime actually means for firms, and why the timeline is shorter than most people appreciate. The FCA gateway opens on 30 September. The policy statements land in the summer. The consultation responses are due now. That window, she argues, is not generous, and firms that are treating this as something to think about later are already behind. There's a strong thread on what the new regime doesn't replace. Financial promotions rules, consumer duty, money laundering regulations, these don't disappear when the crypto framework arrives. They sit alongside it, and understanding how everything hangs together is its own piece of work. The UK's approach is fundamentally different from MiCA in that it's being incorporated into FISMA rather than built as a standalone framework, and that distinction creates real complexity, particularly around stablecoins, where the UK is proposing two separate regulatory frameworks depending on whether a stablecoin is deemed systemic. There's also a genuinely interesting conversation about demystification. Mayuri talks through the Rykworth review, which recommended banning crypto donations to political parties as a recent example of where the policy conversation hasn't caught up with what crypto actually is. And she pulls out two statistics worth sitting with: under-35s are increasingly using crypto as a long-term investment vehicle, and 39% of them are using AI to make those decisions. Both point to the same underlying problem, which is that credible financial education in this space is still lagging badly behind where consumers already are. The episode closes on the US comparison, not as a regulatory model to copy, but as a lesson in sequencing. What the SEC is doing well, she argues, is creating space for markets to demonstrate they can work before locking in the guardrails. The UK risks doing it the other way round. And with 99% of stablecoins currently dollar-backed, the question of whether GBP-backed stablecoins get the room to thrive is, in her framing, a sovereignty question as much as a regulatory one. If you work in crypto, financial services compliance, or anywhere near the FCA's regulated marketing environment, this is the context you need for a year that Mayuri describes as the one that decides the next decade. Since the recording of this podcast the following have been updated or published. The FCA's Policy Statements have now been published. The FCA's pre application service opened in July The Consumer Duty consultation is now out The UK/EU Summit has been moved to October.