Welcome Elis Veysalova

We're excited to announce that Elis has joined Dfns as Trust & Compliance Officer. Elis brings over eight years of experience leading governance, risk, and compliance programs for regulated financial entities, with a dual legal and information security background that is unusually well-matched to the work ahead. She holds an LL.M. in Law from Sofia University and an LL.M. in Law of Internet Technology from Università Bocconi, and joins us from Bitpanda, where she most recently served as Expert Information Security & ICT GRC, CISO of Bitpanda Custody UAE and ISO for Bitpanda Malta.

From law to information security leadership

Elis began her career in the legal profession, at Dimitrov, Petrov & Co., one of Bulgaria's leading technology and data protection law firms working on GDPR compliance projects across multiple sectors That practice is what shaped the trajectory of her career toward the intersection of law, data, and technology, and she went on to formalise it with a specialised LL.M. at Bocconi covering cybersecurity, the law of blockchain and cryptoassets, AI and robotics law, and transactional law in the digital context.

This grounding matters in the work Dfns does. The teams operating digital asset infrastructure at institutional scale are increasingly working through the same questions Elis has been answering for years: how regulatory obligations translate into concrete controls, how policies and architecture should fit together, and where legal text needs to become operational reality.

Over the past five years, she progressed through increasingly senior information security roles, ultimately reaching Expert Information Security & ICT GRC, while concurrently holding the CISO role for Bitpanda Custody UAE and the ISO role for Bitpanda Malta. In that capacity she drove the definition and execution of  the cybersecurity strategy, embedding DORA, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and GDPR requirements across the organisation. She designed and implemented the major incident management and reporting framework from the ground up, continuously aligned and adapted core security policies to the newest regulations and standards and also established the organisation's first AI governance process, developing an assessment workflow aligned with the EU AI Act. She introduced CIA-based vendor risk requirements and led security due diligence for 15+ global banking and institutional partners, including RakBank and Deutsche Bank  and she coordinated external audits for SOC 2 Type 1 and ISO 27001, achieving zero major findings.

That last point matters. In a regulated business, the quality of the GRC function is most visible in how audits go and how regulators respond. Elis has consistently delivered both.

What Elis will build at Dfns

At Dfns, Elis will report into the CISO and lead the trust and compliance function as we continue to scale across jurisdictions and serve a growing roster of regulated institutional clients. Her remit covers the compliance programs that underpin our SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications, our readiness against global regulatory regimes including MiCA, DORA, and emerging digital asset frameworks, and the partnership with product and security teams to make sure compliance is built into the way our infrastructure is designed rather than retrofitted afterward. She will also be a primary point of contact for clients, auditors, and regulators on trust and compliance matters.

Given the regulatory momentum across Europe and the UAE, and the depth of institutional adoption we are seeing across our client base, Elis joins at exactly the right moment. Her combination of legal training, hands-on GRC delivery, and CISO-level operational experience in a regulated crypto custodian is rare, and it is exactly what our clients need from us.

We're excited to have her on board.

We’re hiring!

Dfns continues to grow across compliance, engineering, product, commercial, and operations. If you're interested in building infrastructure for the next generation of financial systems, we'd love to hear from you. 

Apply here: jobs.deel.com/job-boards/dfns