Finance committee  Thank you.

Finance committee  There is not an equivalent to SWIFT for cryptocurrency, but if you have a regulated industry with the gatekeepers, as Stéphane referred to, and the centralized platform to enable the exchange of crypto for fiat currency, you have incredible levers to prevent money from being moved via cryptocurrency and then exchanged for dollars.

Finance committee  It's a good question, Daniel. Again, I would come back to the point that public blockchains like Bitcoin, by their nature, are public. You can see every transaction that's ever occurred on the Bitcoin blockchain since it was created. That's a degree of transparency that we don't actually have in aspects of our banking system otherwise, where we rely on intermediaries to produce their own ledgers of transactions that occur.

Finance committee  No, that's a good question. I think the way we look at it is that in following the risk-based approach to anti-money laundering, you do need to assign risk ratings to various clients. For example, politically exposed persons are held to a higher risk rating because of their attachment to government.

Finance committee  Dustin, do you want to take that or do you want me to take that?

Finance committee  I'll give it a shot. Like in any industry, there are good players and sometimes not so good players. The challenge that we see in cryptocurrency is that, perhaps because many jurisdictions around the world have approached this space with caution, you see some Internet-enabled crypto companies moving to offshore jurisdictions, where they're received with welcoming arms.

Finance committee  I would just add that I think the securities industry focus on the simple buying and selling of crypto assets has been a good focus, but the next evolution of crypto technology is in payments, in lending, in insurance, in art and in gaming. Many of those dimensions are federal in nature, and having a supportive tax regime, a supportive accounting regime and a supportive financial and banking regime, to enable the technologies will require, I think, a whole-of-government approach, which is what we saw the White House instructing the U.S. government to do just last week with an executive order.

Finance committee  It's really hard to know. I think it's like one step forward and two steps back. We're each working towards it, but you certainly see more venture investment in the United States. You see more companies that have achieved a global scale operating out of the United States. I think for us to have not just a domestic industry but also homegrown champions operating internationally, more could be done.

Finance committee  Sure. I have a couple of comments. First off, we have abided by the additional sanctions that have been added on Russian names since the terrible invasion of Ukraine. We are of course ensuring that we are doing everything we can to prevent our platform from being used as a means of illegal financing of that war or a place for Russian oligarchs to hide their money.

Finance committee  We went through a similar operational exercise. We reviewed all of our client lists across all of our wealth management and our crypto clients. None of our crypto clients were on any of the identified names lists provided by the RCMP. We had one wealth management client whose account was temporarily frozen for about three days.

Finance committee  We did not notify the client. There is good reason not to notify clients in these circumstances. One thing I would observe is that the client was one who had a registered account with us, which has certain tax treatments. One of the unfortunate consequences of the breadth of the order is that any wealth management firm that held RRSPs for an individual whose name was on this RCMP list was in a position, as we were, where there would be a need to freeze those registered accounts in some capacity, even though it's hard to draw a line between how a registered RSP account could be used to directly fund the activities that were subject to the order.

Finance committee  It is a separate regime, so it's not one and the same. The one thing that is important to distinguish here is that with someone's day-to-day chequing account, which they might be using to buy groceries or pay the rent, it would be quite disruptive for that individual to go to the store to buy groceries and find that they were unable to access their account and their funds.

Finance committee  Absolutely. I was referring only to the point about proactively telling a client that their accounts had been impacted in some way. It's a different experience for a Canadian to find that their debit card doesn't work, for example.

Finance committee  I would just add that I think it's important to always come back to the point that the technology itself is neutral. It's technology that can be used for good or for bad. There are many, many examples of it being used for good. Unfortunately, there are some examples of it being used for bad.

Finance committee  The only thing I would add is that the developer community for cryptocurrency applications is strong, is growing and is also very mobile. They will move to jurisdictions where they see friendly environments for developing new technology, new applications and new systems. We have a perfect example in the founders of the Ethereum blockchain network, which was really the pioneer in enabling much more sophisticated financial transactions on a blockchain, besides simple Bitcoin transactions.