Edwin Mata is CEO & Co-Founder of Brickken.

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In digital finance, we love noise. New apps, tokens, and “disruptive” models get all the airtime. Yet, the real inflection point is unfolding in the most unglamorous corner of the industry: compliance, governance, and record-keeping.

Regulation is not the backdrop to innovation. It is the mechanism through which the sector becomes investable, scalable and credible. Today’s inflection point is defined not by a new consumer product but by whether digital assets can meet the governance expectations that global finance takes for granted.

Regulation as the Moment of Maturity

Traditional finance learned this a long time ago. Modern capital markets only became investable at scale after securities laws in the 1930s forced transparency, continuous disclosure, and enforcement, restoring confidence after catastrophic failures. The US Securities Exchange Act of 1934 didn’t kill markets; it gave them the legal scaffolding to grow into the backbone of global savings.

Crypto and digital assets are now entering a similar “boringly serious” phase. In the EU, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, is designed to give legal clarity to crypto-asset issuers and service providers. For institutional compliance teams, that kind of predictability is far more important than whichever buzzword happens to dominate a conference stage.

The impact on capital flows is already visible: 83% of institutional investors plan to increase allocations to digital assets with regulatory clarity as a key driver of that enthusiasm. Clear rules don’t strangle innovation, they compress uncertainty and lower the risk premium that has kept cautious money on the sidelines.

The Boring Revolution Behind Institutional Capital

That’s why the real story in digital finance is a “boring revolution.” The work that actually matters now is the industrialisation of KYC and KYB, AML monitoring, standardized reporting, on-chain and off-chain reconciliation, governance workflows, and provable rights attached to digital instruments. The industry still loves to obsess over the next shiny app, but the real bottleneck is whether institutions can trust the rails beneath the interface.

RegTech has quietly reframed compliance tooling as an edge rather than a punishment. Technology-driven compliance improves risk assessment, fraud detection, and overall competitiveness because it lets institutions scale digital finance without losing sight of their exposure. That is where the durable upside sits, in making digital assets behave like a serious asset class, not a speculative game with good branding.

From the vantage point of building tokenization infrastructure, the pattern is consistent. When institutions evaluate real-world-asset tokenization, they don’t begin by asking which chain you use or how “decentralized” it is. Their focus is not the chain. It is whether ownership, entitlements, corporate actions and governance can be evidenced, enforced and audited in ways that align with securities law and accounting standards. If those foundations are sound, the rest of the architecture becomes negotiable.

You can see the same shift in where venture money is going. Over 70% of digital asset investment now targets institutional and infrastructure-focused platforms, up from just 27% a decade ago; the funding narrative has pivoted away from consumer speculation toward institutional plumbing. 

That is not a romantic story, but it is the kind that tends to survive more than one market cycle.

From Flashy Apps to Trustworthy Systems

Banks and large asset managers are adjusting their priorities accordingly. Governance, risk management, and compliance modernisation are stressed as core investment themes, especially as new digital-asset rules and prudential standards come into force. Digital finance is being pulled into the centre of regulated balance sheets and internal control frameworks.

At the same time, some institutions now describe digital assets, including tokenized bonds and money-market funds, as a “mainstream subject” for their clients. We explicitly link the shift from fringe to mainstream to better regulatory frameworks and institutional-grade infrastructure rather than retail hype. The catalyst is not design; it is the underlying certainty that these instruments carry governance, accounting treatment and supervisory oversight consistent with established financial products.

This is the narrative inversion digital finance still struggles with. For a decade, the space behaved as if UX, community and tokenomics could overpower everything else. That era produced experimentation, but also a long tail of ungoverned projects that institutional capital simply cannot touch.

If digital finance wants to sit alongside public equities, investment-grade debt and regulated funds, the front end has to be the last question. What matters is whether the system can prove who owns what, under which rules, and with what recourse when things go wrong. That’s the baseline requirement for anyone managing real risk.

Compliance as Product, Not Overhead

The opportunity for fintech founders now is to treat compliance engineering, data governance and risk architecture as core product. The firms that take regulatory expectations seriously, encode them into workflows, and expose them as reliable platforms will become the quiet chokepoints of the next cycle. Regulated entities won’t integrate ten different “innovative” front ends if each one creates a new audit headache; they will integrate the boring rails that make their auditors and supervisors more comfortable, not less.

Collaboration with regulators is becoming central to this shift. Around the world, supervisory authorities are establishing innovation pathways, industry working groups and controlled testing environments that allow technical design and regulatory expectations to evolve together. This model may disappoint purists who prefer unbounded experimentation, but it is the only credible way to align programmable financial systems with the governance, risk and reporting obligations of real-world finance.

The irony is that the least glamorous corner of digital finance is where the most durable value will be created. The “boring revolution” is the recognition that trust, compliance and governance are not obstacles to innovation but the substrate on which the next generation of financial systems will quietly compound.

As the Santa Barbara Unified school board faces a projected $20 million deficit and declining reserves, trustees voted unanimously Thursday night to change who leads the district’s Finance Committee — removing community member Todd Voigt in favor of future boardmember leadership.

The move — approved in Resolution 2024-25-32A — immediately drew criticism from parents, primarily on the Facebook page S.B. Parent Leadership Action Network (S.B. PLAN), who accused the board of consolidating power just as the district’s fiscal outlook grows increasingly precarious.

“This is a power grab,” said Michele Voigt, wife of Todd Voigt and a San Marcos parent who spoke during public comment. “We are at a point of serious financial concern, and the board is reducing independent oversight.”

Voigt urged the board to view the First Interim Budget Report as more than numbers on a slide. “I’m asking you tonight to look at this first interim not as a technical report, but a test of your governance and your duty to the community you represent,” she said. “Your own projections point to reserves falling below the state minimum and trending toward zero within a few years. And no one will be able to say that they didn’t see it coming.”

Despite Voigt’s comments, the district’s interim financial report told a more nuanced story. The district’s chief business official, Conrad Tedeschi, iterated different figures, figures that were part of the long-term financial plan approved by the board. Overall the numbers were not a surprise, emphasizing that the district is not in crisis and remains above the state-mandated 3 percent minimum reserve level.

According to Tedeschi, there are improved revenue projections and a growing deficit. Total revenue for 2024-25 increased to $244 million, up from the adopted budget, driven by higher-than-expected one-time grants, including a major boost to the Expanded Learning Opportunity Program, which rose from a projected $3 million to $5.2 million after the state updated its formula. However, expenditures also climbed, pushing the projected deficit from $15 million to $20 million. Tedeschi said the increase reflects rising labor costs following the district’s recent wage settlement with teachers. Salaries and benefits now account for 81 percent of all district spending. 

Despite the shortfall, Tedeschi emphasized that reserves remain above target: currently at 8.52 percent, compared to the board’s adopted budget of 8.92 percent and well above the state-required 3 percent minimum. Multi-year projections show that with planned reductions, the deficit could shrink to $6.7 million by 2027-28, provided the district makes at least $6 million in cuts over the next two years to maintain a minimum 5 percent reserve. “That’s not a satisfactory level for a basic aid district,” Tedeschi said, “but staying above 5 percent is the minimum needed to keep our budget certified.”

Still, there was ongoing tension over who chairs the Finance Committee — centering on concerns about transparency and legal compliance. The board’s newly passed resolution requires that only elected trustees can serve as committee chair, replacing community member Todd Voigt with a boardmember moving forward.

At the heart of the move is compliance with the Brown Act, California’s open-meeting law that governs transparency in public agencies. Under the law, committees subject to the Brown Act must have properly agendized items for any votes or actions to be legal and binding. Board President William Banning said the Finance Committee had previously taken action on items not properly listed on agendas, potentially violating the law and opening the district to liability. 

“These amendments reinforce that commitment [to compliance] and position the Finance Committee to continue its work in a way that is focused, lawful, collaborative, and ultimately highly valuable to the board and the community we serve,” Banning said.

The amended resolution changes Finance Committee bylaws to require that only a boardmember may serve as chair, ending Voigt’s tenure. It also outlines procedures for member removal and reaffirms the committee’s advisory-only role.

“I am the Chair of the Finance Committee, maybe for 15 more minutes,” said Todd Voigt during public comment. “I agreed to serve because I care deeply about this community and its future. I’m a volunteer with no political ambitions. My sole purpose is to provide sound advice and expertise for the benefit of our schools.”

Voigt called the resolution a “serious mistake” and warned that removing the independent chair would erode the very trust the district had been trying to rebuild. “If the board controls both the committee and its leadership, that independence disappears,” he said.

He also made a pointed recommendation to the board. “Should this passage occur … I strongly urge the board to select Boardmember [Celeste] Kafri as the chairperson. She has consistently demonstrated a commitment to addressing the district’s financial challenges,” Voigt said. “By contrast… Boardmember Banning opposed a committee goal I proposed to reduce the deficit. Leadership that does not prioritize deficit reduction is unacceptable.”

Board President William Banning, who was formally elected to the role earlier in the evening, defended the resolution and its timing.

“This is a normal part of building effective governance structures,” he said. “The resolution … strengthens Brown Act compliance … clarifies the committee’s strictly advisory role … and ensures that meetings are presided over by a trustee trained in Open Meeting Law and accountable to the public.”

Banning said that while the original intent was to demonstrate openness by appointing a community chair, it had created confusion around agenda-setting and governance boundaries. “That pattern typically follows the line of … a community member is chair in an attempt to demonstrate openness and shared leadership … and then in early meeting experiences, there is agenda-setting confusion, there’s boundary drift, and difficulties with Brown Act procedures.”

Boardmember Kafri pushed back on parts of the resolution, questioning why the committee chair needed to be replaced at all. “Why is it that we need to replace the committee head … because of a misunderstanding about the Brown Act when most of the committee members have never been on a Brown Act committee before?” she asked. “Could an orientation and a better understanding … prevent future Brown Act violations?”

That prompted clarification from Banning: “It is not only common, but standard practice throughout the state of California … that the committee chair be one of the appointed board representatives.”

Boardmember Gabe Escobedo supported Kafri’s interest in making the committee more effective, but reminded the board to stay focused. “More of what Ms. Kafri is talking about is like the mechanics, and I trust that Mr. Tedeschi will be responsive to the needs of the group and be able to present the information in a way that is going to be digestible,” he said. “What I would hope is that we can focus more on just the mechanics of what’s in the resolution — the words.”

The resolution passed unanimously, but not without raising questions about trust, power, and what transparency means when community expertise is asked to sit down.

As Escobedo noted: “We have the fiduciary responsibility…. It only makes sense to direct the work of the advisory committee to aid us in making those really difficult decisions.”

Simply Asset Finance has reported that its total loan origination reached £2bn ($2.6bn) in 2025, following its growth and lending activity during the period.

During 2025, the company’s gross loan book increased to £543m and its customer base grew to 13,000.

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Additional digital platforms came online, and commercial loans were added to the range of available finance solutions.

Improvements in the company’s own technology and stronger results in various regions contributed to increased efficiency in lending operations and a broader local presence for SME clients.

In July, Simply Asset Finance introduced Kara, an AI-powered virtual agent.

Kara uses the company’s past data to enhance user interactions, streamline internal processes, and speed up decisions on lending applications.

Simply Asset Finance CEO Mike Randall said: “Our growth this year has built on the momentum of 2024, and reaching £2bn is a clear milestone for the business. All our channels have driven that progress, with rising demand for specialist lending helping us expand our footprint and support even more SMEs across the UK.

“Despite a year of challenging economic conditions, small businesses have remained resilient and ready to invest. Kara has been central to meeting demand quickly and efficiently –  and we expect her value to our customers will only grow.

“As we head into 2026, we’re focused on carrying this momentum forward and working with even more brilliant businesses to unlock their potential.”

Last month, Simply Asset Finance became a Patron lender of the National Association of Commercial Finance Brokers (NACFB).

This partnership is aimed at supporting the broker community in the UK and increasing access to asset finance and leasing products through wider distribution. 

The NACFB is known as an independent UK trade association for commercial finance intermediaries, promoting cooperation between lenders and brokers across the sector.

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