As agentic commerce and blockchain take off, regulators and industry players are underestimating “the need for true, timely action,” said a Treasury and National Security Council alum.

LAS VEGAS – There’s some truth to the perception that regulators can be slow to respond to innovation and resistant to updating regulations to accommodate new technologies in the financial sector, a former federal official said Sunday at the Money20/20 conference.

But industry often doesn’t acknowledge its role in driving understanding, said Carole House, founder and CEO of Penumbra Strategies, a technology and national security advisory firm, during a session at the event in Las Vegas.

And collaboration is crucial to moving faster to combat threats to the financial system, she said.

“Both sides need to understand each other and come at each other with greater empathy and timeliness on collaboration,” House said Sunday. “Public-private really sits at the heart of our ability to address these threats.”

House, a Treasury Department alum who’s also served on the National Security Council, testified during a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing in May related to modernizing the Bank Secrecy Act for 21st-century financial crime.

Amid a confluence of burgeoning technologies including blockchain and agentic commerce, regulators and industry players are underestimating “the need for true, timely action,” she said Sunday.

With increasingly sophisticated technology fueling automation and decentralization, “we need to figure out how to keep pace and modernize the illicit finance framework to keep pace with that,” House said.

“Because whether it's combating adversarial capital making its way into our defense supply chains, or pig-butchering networks that are leveraging Chinese money laundering organizations and human trafficking fueled scam centers in East Asia, all of these are issues that are affecting us and humanity,” she said.

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