Ex-FCA policy insider explains the ‘great divide’ in the UK’s crypto ambition

Isadora Arredondo, a former policy official at the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority who is now vice president of global policy at Hedera, says Britain’s push to become a crypto hub has been slowed more by competing priorities and a gap between policy design and execution than by plain hostility to the sector.

She described a “great divide between the ambition to drive policy and how it is actually implemented.” Arredondo points to events that shaped the FCA during her time there: rewriting large parts of the rulebook for life after Brexit, the COVID crisis that shifted the regulator into crisis mode, and the fallout from high‑profile investment failures such as London Capital & Finance and the Woodford Fund.

Those pressures, she says, pushed the regulator toward a stronger consumer‑protection focus under CEO Nikhil Rathi.

United Kingdom, London

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