A Common Language for Compliance
An interview with Nicole Dyskant by Sean Murphy
For a digital-asset firm, the sharpest regulatory pain is often the overlap between regimes, the grey zone where a single offering can trigger two sets of rules at once. A payments firm that adds stablecoins finds itself inside MiCA, the European crypto framework; a stablecoin issuer that touches fiat currency may also need a payment services licence; and a hard-won MiCA licence does nothing the moment a firm wants to serve clients in the United States or Brazil. Keeping track of where a business does and does not trigger regulation, across every jurisdiction it touches, is one of the problems Nicole Dyskant built RegDoor to solve.
Having spent more than twenty years across capital markets. She started at a broker-dealer that was bought by the largest bank in Brazil, became chief legal and compliance officer for broker-dealers and investment funds, and later worked alongside a former chairman of the CVM, Brazil's securities regulator. Her first company, Compliasset, was a governance, risk and compliance tool built for the Brazilian market and bootstrapped to an acquisition. Around 2021 she went down what she calls the rabbit hole of digital assets, first at a manager of crypto index funds and exchange-traded products, then as an adviser to firms including Fireblocks, TaxBit and Mercado Bitcoin, whose regulatory board she still sits on.
From that vantage point she could see a pattern across every corner of the market. Digital-asset firms are borderless by nature, doing business in several countries at once, and their knowledge of the regulators in each is inconsistent at best. The facts of a conversation with a regulator in Dublin matters to the team in the United States, but the sentiment of it rarely travels, and when an employee leaves, the institutional memory often leaves with them. RegDoor, a name Dyskant means as “opening the doors of regulation,” answers that first with what she calls a Regulatory Relationship Manager, a CRM in the mould of Salesforce or HubSpot “but for interactions with the government.” The aim is to keep what she terms “corporate diplomacy” inside the company rather than in the heads of individuals.
RegDoor integrates with your calendar, with Gmail, with WhatsApp and Slack, so that an employee can forward a voice note saying they met a particular regulator and what was discussed, and the platform recognises the official from a base pre-populated with who is who across jurisdictions, then files the interaction cleanly. The record builds itself, and a global firm ends up with a global view of its regulatory relationships instead of a set of disconnected memories.
A second pillar grew directly out of what early users asked for. Alongside the relationship layer, clients wanted monitoring, the horizon-scanning of consultations, bills and the public speeches of officials that signal where the rules are heading. General-purpose models are not much use here, in Dyskant's view, because they lean on secondary sources, newsletters and consultants' interpretations rather than the primary text. RegDoor's agents go straight to the source, curate the data, and are built to reason with a regulatory and legal mindset, which lets the company offer what it calls agent as a service, automating the reports, presentations and question-and-answer documents that compliance teams spend their days assembling.
The timing is on her side. Analysts valued the RegTech market at roughly seven billion dollars in 2021, growing toward sixteen billion by 2026, and the wave of digital-asset rulemaking is only increasing. Dyskant has built this company differently from her first. She launched with strong beta users, Mercado Bitcoin, ABCRIPTO (the Brazilian Association of Cryptoeconomy) and Hedera among the logos, and many of her early angel investors are the founders and chief executives of the firms feeling the pain she is solving. A small pre-seed round, around eight hundred thousand dollars when announced and backed by a venture fund and a hedge-fund manager as well as angels, was enough to build the product with a team of twelve, since AI lets three data people curate what once took many more.
Her ambition points somewhere less obvious than more corporate clients. She wants to bring the same tools to the public sector, to help regulators themselves build better and more interoperable rules. Supervisors, in her telling, are often stuck in paper and default to conservative regulation because they lack the means to supervise or enforce anything more ambitious, which in turn pushes firms to shop for the friendliest jurisdiction. Give regulators the same information and tools the private sector already has, she argues, and the rules could finally begin to harmonise across borders.
