Adrienne Harris Reflects on Four Years of Redefining Financial Regulation in New York

Watch more: Monday Conversation: Superintendent Adrienne Harris

Can a regulator serve two masters? Adrienne Harris says yes. The outgoing New York Department of Financial Services superintendent pioneered payments innovations such as the BitLicense framework and the oversight of emerging products like stablecoins and BNPL. She tells PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that her goal from the start was to prove that regulators can be both pro-consumer and pro-business.

“Too often we set up a false choice in financial regulation,” said Harris who stepping down after four years in the role. “I’ve always believed you can protect consumers and markets and be good for business at the same time.”

That philosophy helped define the DFS as a national model for what might be termed, as Harris and Webster agreed, “the department of YES” — one that embraces innovation within well-defined guardrails.

It’s an approach that, according to Harris, required changing the mindset of both staff and industry stakeholders over a period of years.

As Harris departs, Executive Deputy Superintendent for Research and Innovation Kaitlyn Asrow will assume the role of acting superintendent, ensuring continuity. Harris noted that Asrow “has been a big part of what we’ve built over the past four years,” giving stakeholders confidence that DFS’s leadership in digital finance will continue.

That continuity is crucial as the agency navigates a financial landscape transformed by the “Internet of money.”

Harris told Webster that stablecoins will be central to that transformation. “Thinking about how we might make especially wholesale payments and treasury functions more efficient for businesses … could really be a game changer,” she said.

While enthusiastic about the potential, Harris also warned that the lessons of 2008 and the financial crisis of that year still apply. “Everybody should continue to be mindful of the risks while thinking about some of the benefits the technology will bring,” she said.

The DFS’s early adoption of the BitLicense framework positioned New York as the leading U.S. jurisdiction in digital asset oversight. Harris noted she wouldn’t change much about it. “Often people think of the rule as the end, and we think of it as the beginning,” she said, noting that DFS has since issued 11 pieces of guidance on issues from market manipulation to blockchain analytics.

That groundwork influenced Congress’s recent GENIUS Act, which Webster described as “a copy and paste” of the DFS’s stablecoin framework. The agency’s virtual currency team has grown from a handful of staff to 60 specialists, “perhaps the largest virtual currency regulatory group anywhere in the world,” she said.

DFS’s next chapter will include formal rule-making for buy now, pay later. Harris said the department’s proposed rules will address fees, disclosures, and credit reporting, while ensuring that regulation keeps pace with evolving models. “We want to make sure we write a rule that accounts for models that exist today and those that may come into existence in the future,” she explained. 

She emphasized coordination with other states and international regulators to avoid fragmentation. “We always work very hard to harmonize with existing frameworks,” Harris said, “but there are going to be issues where we feel differently than others.”

Harris’s tenure included turbulent moments—from the crypto winter to the collapses of Silvergate, SVB, and Signature Bank, which DFS supervised. “Signature sort of got tagged with being this crypto bank … which actually wasn’t the case,” she recalled. The experience led to internal reforms. “We changed our escalation procedure” and tightened the feedback loop on examinations, she said, adding that regulators must adapt to “a time when you can move lots of money really quickly from a mobile device — between subway stops no less.”

As she exits, Harris says her proudest achievements go beyond crypto. “We’ve gotten over $725 million in restitution … money back in New Yorkers’ pockets,” she said. Still, her broader legacy lies in redefining how regulators can advance innovation without sacrificing accountability. As Webster summed up: “You didn’t just regulate innovation — you redefined how regulation needs to support innovation in a way that is sustainable and durable for all stakeholders.”

PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster is one of the world’s leading experts in payments innovation and the digital economy, advising multinational companies and sitting on boards of emerging AI, healthtech and real-time payments firms, including a non-executive director on the Sezzle board, a publicly traded BNPL provider. She founded PYMNTS.com in 2009, a top media platform covering innovation in payments, commerce and the digital economy. Webster is also the author of the NEXT newsletter and a co-founder of Market Platform Dynamics, specializing in driving and monetizing innovation across industries.

Adrienne Harris is the current and outgoing Superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, where she leads regulation of banking, insurance, FinTech, and consumer protection initiatives across the state. 

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