Any conversation with Cense co-founder and CEO Dennis Wohlfarth will be an enlightening one. Today, the Swiss-born tech entrepreneur has a mission on his mind: to help Europe’s banks love digital assets and urgently build-out the capabilities to make that possible, harnessing significant competitive advantage in the process.
Changing attitudes and mindsets as well as systems and technologies, his ultimate goal is to encourage banks to see crypto as an integral part of the 21st century financial ecosystem and not, as he puts it, “a hot potato that sits in a separate box.”
From teenage tech enthusiast to early Bitcoin advocate – he “loves anything with maths in it” – Wohlfarth was quick to identify that a substantial amount of essential infrastructure was absent from the digital asset space. He and his partners have since set about building it from the ground up.
The story picks up speed back in 2019 when he had to prove the origins of his own crypto funds by creating a bespoke ‘Proof of Transaction’ report. Inspired by this problem -and the knowledge that he wasn’t the only one to face it- Wohlfarth co-founded Cense in 2023 to focus on transforming crypto compliance processes at speed and scale inside banks.
Fast forward to today and he is part of a group of three pioneering FinTech businesses – Cense, Glassnode and Swissblock – that together serve the full value chain in the crypto sector.
“At Cense, our solution puts us in a unique position because we already have 10 years in the market, with our own infrastructure in place, in addition to our historical IP and deep connections with law enforcement and regulators,” he says. This gives the business not only a clear technological head-start, but the credibility, insight and expertise needed to help tackle the challenges that banks face in dealing with crypto.
The banking perspective
Wohlfarth says that banks face a mix of motivations and challenges, internal and external, in managing the coming shift towards digital assets. “Banks tend not to do things in parallel, so they are slow-moving,” he notes. “They all have different approaches, although many share a single point of view. And many see crypto as an isolated feature of the financial system, but that thinking is wrong – you wouldn’t see gold that way.”
“Big banks are turning business away because they don’t know how to analyse it. With software like Cense, banks don’t need to be scared.”
Dennis Wohlfarth
However, there are cheerleaders among the pack. Banks are improving their teams, their talents and their knowledge. “The banks that stand out today are the ones that see crypto from a holistic perspective and offer a whole range of services and competencies around it,” said Wohlfarth.
“What does ‘good’ look like?” he asks. “An understanding by banks that crypto is part of the ecosystem, not an isolated issue. They first need to make a decision to embrace crypto or not, backed by clear vision from the top, and then bring about complete internal alignment on how to implement it. In one case, we’re talking to seven different departments at the same bank – they are not aligned on who should be responsible for crypto.”
The opportunity: a new banking capability
If bureaucratic challenges and internal politics can be overcome, Wohlfarth is clear that a new strategic capability is opening up for the banking sector: advanced, transparent crypto/blockchain compliance at scale.
By deploying a mix of automation and human expertise, banks can not only open the door to new inflows to boost their assets under management, but deal with remediation issues from their customers’ legacy crypto activity. Become a crypto-friendly bank, he says, and there’s significant first mover advantage.
To make it happen, it will take a combination of executive attention, operational maturity and clear ownership across compliance, risk and the wider business. And the underlying technology exists today. “Nothing needs to be built from scratch. The tech is ready to integrate now, to be able to onboard new crypto clients at scale”, says Wohlfarth. “This is a challenge that banks need to solve now, because tokenised assets are not going away.”
Towards portfolio-based analysis
There is also a tangible need for banks to see the bigger picture and analyse client crypto holdings in the round. Automated systems like Cense make this possible by marrying a deep dive with breadth of vision.
“To move forward, banks need to shift their focus from interpreting single transactions to what we call a ‘portfolio approach’ which analyses much more than a single crypto wallet or exchange… in other words, to take a full 360-degree view of client crypto activity. An integrated view is the ultimate enabler,” stated Wohlfarth.
“An integrated view is the ultimate enabler.”
Dennis Wohlfarth
Future Cense
What’s next for Cense? To maintain its growth trajectory and build out its service departments, as well as partnering and collaborating worldwide with private banks including Van Lanschot Kempen of the Netherlands and technology partners like Chainalysis in the US. But it also takes a broader leadership view of its mission to engage banks, intermediaries and the wider institutional market.
As Wohlfarth observes: “The future of crypto compliance is a fully automated system, with a human in the loop of course, that scans the entire crypto ecosystem to help good actors to act faster while leaving no room for illicit actors.”
“We want to get the market ready for a world of tokenised assets, and that means understanding and embracing blockchain. There is a pressing need to join the whole ecosystem up and enable full transparency.”
Cense will be attented the Global RegTech Summit next week on the 20th May, 2026. For more information on the event, click here.
Cense also recently conducted a podcast on the topic of digital assets in private banking and what every C-Level needs to know. Find it here.
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