Welcome Roman!

Roman Goldstein

Klaros is a small firm, and historically it’s been unusual for us to add more than one team member a month, if that - but business is strong. Hot on the heels of adding Valerie Song (Senior Director, Licensing) and Sepideh Rowland (Partner, BSA/AML) to the team, I’m excited to welcome Roman Goldstein as Senior Director to support our growing licensing practice.

Roman’s superpower—translating between regulatorese and techspeak to enable safe, responsible, and scalable innovation—is exactly what Klaros clients need. He can decode complex regulations into plain English, explain regulators' unwritten expectations, and develop “new ways of conducting the very old business of banking,” especially through trust banks. 

That superpower will come in handy in our bank licensing practice, which is where Roman will be working initially. Putting together an application for a banking license, especially for the non-traditional applicant Klaros works with, is a multidisciplinary effort. It requires expertise in bank products and services, financial management, compliance, all kinds of risk management, and good common horse sense—to say nothing of a deep understanding of the competitive landscape, the regulatory environment, the specific regulatory and supervisory concerns associated with each client’s business model, and the tools available to mitigate those concerns.  These are hard, complex projects in which much of the craft lies in developing mutual understanding by articulating relevant issues and solutions in language that makes sense to innovators and regulators alike.

Roman joins us from the staff of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, where, as Lead Innovation Policy Analyst, he reviewed banks’ plans to engage in novel activities, reviewed foreign bank licensing applications, and developed supervisory policy for BaaS, open banking, and crypto. Before that, he served as an associate general counsel for Coinbase, where he advised the cryptocurrency company on compliance with banking and securities laws. In that capacity, he secured regulatory approvals worth $275M in revenue per year, including first-of-their-kind product approvals, and oversaw licensing for Coinbase Custody Trust Company. Roman has also been a banking lawyer in private practice with Sullivan & Cromwell and spent twelve years at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, where he was a banking lawyer, a bank examiner specializing in treasury and market risk, and special assistant to the chief counsel, overseeing regulatory approvals for novel securitization and asset management activities.

Want to chat about risks and opportunities for your business in light of the current environment’s implications for bank licensing, innovation, regulation, or related topics? We’d love to hear from you. Send us a note at hello@klaros.com.