She moved to Goldman in 2000, with her focus still on compliance. She eventually rose to the role of managing director and co-head of compliance for Asia Pacific ex-Japan. Although the investment banking industry has a deserved reputation as a boys' club, she says, her former employer was surprisingly good at developing female leaders. "In investment banking, there are not that many women, and you have to go drinking, get into sports-boys' stuff. But Goldman were exceptional in driving diversity. They were very good to me: they put me in a leadership development programme, and I developed women at all levels."

Having spent nearly two decades working for the most prestigious name in investment banking, her decision in 2019 to move on was pretty momentous. "A lot of people were shocked" when she announced to her colleagues that she was leaving the bank, she says. "I was the sort of person who people thought was going to be a lifer-who would still be there turning off the lights."

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"I figured I was too young to retire, but I could see myself doing the same thing for whatever number of years. I didn't see how I could do anything new there." Perhaps those colleagues were particularly shocked at her choice of destination: Bitmex, the Seychelles-registered, Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange that was founded in 2014 and quickly went supernova, largely thanks to the innovative derivatives trading platform it offers.

She joined the company in March 2019 as its chief operating officer. "I had no interest in crypto before Bitmex," she says. "But when I realised how crypto was developing, banking felt a little bit more like a sunset industry, and I felt that crypto would have more opportunities. Also, there was a fit between what they needed and what I had. I don't know of any other senior compliance people working in crypto. I saw the senior people there had clean backgrounds and were well regarded in the crypto world, so I joined."

Her background in compliance made her a particularly attractive employment prospect for Bitmex, which has had its fair share of legal and regulatory travails. In 2020, its founders Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Samuel Reed were charged with violating the US Bank Secrecy Act for failing to establish an anti-money-laundering programme; all three stood down from their roles and have since pled guilty to the charges.

From the most traditional of investment banks to a freewheeling crypto exchange: it's hard to think of two financial organisations that you'd expect to be more different from each other in culture. "The only similarity is that Bitmex wants to be the Goldman Sachs of crypto," says Khoo. "The guys who founded it are seriously smart individuals."

"The CTO [Reed] was 29 when I joined and the other two 34 or 35. I ran a business that was bigger than the division I ran at Goldman. It was fascinating. The culture could not have been more different. They were geniuses in their way of thinking about doing business."

She continues: "But they're young, they don't know how to run a business and they're not interested in doing so. People who are so young and so smart and have so much money probably think that money can solve everything. I think they underestimated the regulatory issues. In the early days of the crypto industry, the regulations were very lax, and the problem was that there was too much grey- things you didn't have to do but could end up being sanctioned for if you didn't do. The founders of Bitmex didn't look at it from that angle; that's not their area of expertise." After that rather dramatic introduction to the crypto industry, she left the company in May 2021 and set out on her own.

In addition to taking on roles as a senior advisor to Singapore-based retail robo advisory platform StashAway and as a board advisor to Hong Kong-based crypto exchange Fusang, her time has been dominated by her attempts to bring the industry together—or, as she puts it, by "so many industry associations".

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Two of those associations aim to address the fairly shocking shortage of women in the crypto space. While the gender balance at the level of crypto investment in Hong Kong, at least, isn't too bad, the industry itself is still pretty much a sausage party. "It was an idea I had while I was working at Bitmex because there were so few women there. There was nobody leading women in the industry. I always thought that I wanted to do something." The result was W3W, which is aimed at professionals working within the crypto and finance industries.

"Institutions are moving into crypto, and there are plenty of women in traditional finance who want to know about it," says Khoo. "We're going to focus on promoting female leadership. There are a lot of things we can do with Web3; women are going to be able to move the needle more. The whole concept of Web3 is different: it's community-driven. How does that define leadership? What does it mean to be a leader in the world of Web3?"

By contrast, her other female-focused organisation, SatoshiWomen, founded alongside her co-founder Lyndaine Demetilla, chief of staff at Fusang, is aimed at everyone.

"Women from all walks of life can be involved; my helper can take part in SatoshiWomen if she wants. It's mainly about one-on-one education. It just grew organically very quickly because people needed a group to lean on-somewhere they can ask stupid questions. What we're trying to do is just create more access; people don't need to be investing or speculating.”

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In addition to the intended market, she's been amused to find that another group has shown interest. "We get a lot of wives and girlfriends of people who work in the crypto industry. When guys find out what we're doing, they say: 'You should go and join that group.

It's certainly time-consuming, especially as she and Demetilla have been doing it entirely on their own ("People always think I have a crew of people working for me," she says). Still, she's also found time for a deep immersion in industry lobbying via yet another new group, the Asia Crypto Alliance.

"I started thinking about it when I was at Bitmex," she says. "I needed to interact with regulators like I used to do, and I started looking around for an association. There was nothing. There still is: the organisations that are there don't do lobbying. "All these crypto firms are very new, and driving the industry forward is probably at the bottom of their priority list."

The regulatory situation with regard to crypto in Hong Kong remains unresolved. The regulators find themselves in a difficult position, given mainland China's explicit antipathy towards the sector, and there could be a danger of Singapore and a host of other jurisdictions eating Hong Kong's lunch where the industry is concerned; crypto companies have already left the city due to the uncertainty.

Khoo has been liaising extensively with various regulators in fact, she says, she still encounters some of the people she worked with when she worked at the SFC herself, back in the late Nineties.

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"We're having quite intense conversations with regulators in Hong Kong and Singapore. There are so few people in this space who know compliance. It's a thankless job with big hassles and no money, dealing with people who live in the Stone Age. But I felt like there should be someone bridging the gap between the digital asset managers and the regulators."

She adds: "You can get put into prison for unlicensed activity, and that scared a lot of people, so I had to do something. Crypto is definitely not going to be a key priority for the Hong Kong government, but they can see companies leaving Hong Kong."

The SFC has been trying hard to get on top of the ever-changing situation, she says. "The challenge for them is that they're very, very under-resourced, and the people they have don't really understand about crypto. But since last summer they've really tried to get people together and find out their concerns. "Clearly the firms who are already licensed will be in a better position than crypto firms like Bitmex to get a licence. For crypto firms it will be close to impossible. I think they'll move people outside Hong Kong. There's lot of limelight on you if you have a big unregulated exchange here."

Apart from hoping other people can come in and run her various industry bodies, her plans for the future are open-ended but ambitious. "The medium-term plan for me is all about creating an ecosystem,” she says. “I have some investments in different areas, like exchanges, infrastructure and blockchain analytics. But there are just so many projects out there, it's insane. You really have to pick and choose; most of them are just noise."

While she concedes that "I clearly have a vision of where I want things to be and how things should move, and I consider myself an early mover into this space”, she chafes at being described as a visionary. Nonetheless, she very much appears to meet her own definition of one: "You have a view and you stick to it—even when no one else thinks it'll happen."

A resource for women to become their best selves, Front & Female celebrates trailblazers and tackles timely, provocative issues through inspiring content and events. Join the community by subscribing to our newsletter and following #frontandfemale

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