GMO Coin to Improvement Risk Management Following FSA Inspection

GMO Coin, the cryptocurrency exchange owned by Japanese giant GMO Internet, has announced new measures to comply with the requirements of the Japanese financial regulator, according to Live Bitcoin News.

The Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) began inspections of cryptocurrency exchanges in the country earlier this year following the theft of more than 500 million dollars in cryptocurrency from major exchange Coincheck in January.

GMO Coin’s inspection took place in March, and the upshot was that it received a business improvement order from the FSA which requires that it improve its risk management structure.

According to the report, it has submitted a business improvement plan in which it commits to protecting customer information through highly secure countermeasures and improving the quality of the personnel in charge of this operation. The company said in a statement: “We will protect important customer information from increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks by our highly secured countermeasures and pursue to improve group information security literacy and foster security personnel.”

“The management team analyzed and investigated the root causes of system failures, formulated concrete countermeasures, and responded to the actual situation of business expansion,” it added.

The company said that it will improve “(1) business management systems, (2) contingency corresponding readiness plan [in] the event of a failure, (3) information security, cyber security management posture, and (4) quality control and configuration management systems.”

GMO says that it will report on the progress of the improvements “every month by the 10th day of the following month in writing until the implementation of the business improvement plan”.

Tokyo-headquartered GMO, owner of the world’s largest FX provider by trading volume, originally entered the world of cryptocurrency in January of 2017 with the launch of GM Wallet, later rebranded to GMO Coin.

The exchange is supplied with cryptocurrency via its mining operation which it launched in September 2017 in Northern Europe. In February of this year, the company announced that it had made almost 2 million dollars from mining in that month alone, and had dramatically improved its rate of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash mining. While nowhere near it yet, it plans to reach a level where it would rival the output of Chinese mining giant BitFury.

The FSA is one of the few national financial watchdogs to have issued licences to cryptocurrency exchanges, and GMO Coin obtained its license in September of last year.