Karen O’Sullivan is head of the Innovation, payments, market infrastructures and governance Department at the CSSF.

She coordinates the activities of this department which is responsible for financial innovation and the CSSF’s Innovation Hub, both the application process and on-going prudential supervision of payment institutions and electronic money institutions, the registration and AML supervision of virtual asset service providers, market infrastructures and the oversight of remuneration and governance practices and policies implemented within financial institutions.

Furthermore, her team is responsible for coordinating the CSSF’s efforts with regards to MiCA Regulation. In this respect her team spearheads the CSSF’s internal MiCA taskforce and is also directly responsible for the authorisation and subsequent supervision of certain crypto-asset service providers, ART issuers and EMI issuers of EMT.

Being the department in charge of financial innovation means that Karen and her team are the privileged contact and point of entry to the CSSF for the FinTech industry.

She represents the CSSF on an international level through participation in various working sub-groups and as speaker at several conferences, covering payment services, virtual asset and/or crypto asset service providers, innovation topics, and corporate governance matters at both national and international level.

Karen is both an Irish and Luxembourgish qualified chartered accountant. Prior to joining the CSSF in September 2012, Karen was an audit director at PwC Luxembourg specializing in the audit of investment funds.