Benjamin Lawsky, New York State’s Banking Regulator. wants to bypass corporations which are legal fictions and go after individuals and ‘name and shame’ them.

“People do cheat. We want to preserve the reputation of our financial sector and make people realize the vast majority of people on Wall Street and banking do good work,” Mr Lawsky said.

Mr Lawsky, a former federal prosecutor, worked closely with Andrew Cuomo – formerly New York’s attorney-general now the state’s governor. Mr Cuomo created DFS three years ago by merging the state’s banking and insurance regulators and tapped Mr Lawsky to run it. DFS supervises 4,400 entities, with assets of about $6.2tn.

Mr Lawsky’s ambition is to establish New York as the financial technology capital of the world. He’s working on a regulatory blueprint that will woo Bitcoin exchange operators to set up in the state.

He sees regulators as having to adapt and be more nimble to developing technologies – and that includes striking a balance between a bank’s application that can take a year to be approved and the reality that a new technology can become outdated in six months.

Mr Lawsky has personally adopted a revolutionary approach to bank regulation. He tweets from a personal Twitter account – with a modest 2,113 followers – and last month participated in a two-hour long “ask me anything” session on reddit, an open forum social media website, to discuss and learn from users of Bitcoin.

He noted that more than “14,000 people from 117 countries tuned into those hearings online, which was not the usual turnout we get!”

DFS continues to investigate foreign banks for violating US sanctions laws saying the number of existing cases is “not as small as a handful but not dozens”. His office is also actively investigating consulting firms for failing to act independently when advising banks.