Basis Theory has hired Block's former head of product and regulatory legal for its Afterpay division, Jin Han, to oversee the company's product roadmap for regulatory compliance as general counsel.

Han brings over 18 years of experience leading legal and regulatory compliance at companies such as Apple, Klarna, and MobiTV, in addition to Block. At many of these companies, he originated the development of payment ecosystems that would stand up to the requirements of a globally distributed compliance infrastructure.

At Block, Han led the legal team supporting Square Capital's bank charter application and lending operations in 2018. As a founding member of Klarna U.S. and its board of directors, Han helped build Klarna's merchant payment processing platform, consumer lending and BNPL products, network and bank partnerships, IP protection regime and state license portfolio.

While at Apple, Han was lead payment and regulatory counsel for Apple's physical and online retail operations and was an early contributor to the Apple Pay project, where he led Apple Pay's launch negotiations with card issuers and networks.

Han sees the rapid global expansion of the regulatory climate and a growing demand from consumers and government bodies to increase data privacy protections as a forcing function for compliance innovation.

"The fragmented, underfunded, and just-in-time approach to compliance that views it as a cost-centre won't prepare businesses for the coming regulatory winter," Han says.

"Basis Theory's application of tokenisation to data compliance is an ambitious solution that shifts compliance to a value driver instead of a bottleneck. Because sensitive data can be permissioned, masked, and structured for virtually any regulatory use case, adapting to new compliance requirements is much simpler and easier to implement. Basis Theory's flexible platform also means that it does not restrict use of sensitive data by design, but instead unlocks that data for versatile and compliant business use," he adds.

"Jin is an expert at creating the compliance frameworks for large, globally distributed businesses, and he is going to help us build that knowledge into the Basis Theory product suite so any company can implement these best practices as their default technology infrastructure," says Colin Luce, co-founder and CEO, Basis Theory.

"Our goal is to remove the friction from regulatory concerns by baking it into the very foundation of your tech stack and development lifecycle."