ASIA GOLD CONFERENCE

Michael Wharton is a growth strategist and technology leader with over 16 years of international experience spanning regulatory advisory, precious metals, real estate, fintech, crypto, and education. At AKW Consultants, he leads the Precious Metals - Strategy, Growth & Technology vertical, driving business expansion through technology and innovation. Michael’s mission is to develop RegTech solutions that transform compliance in precious metals and other industries into technology and process-driven frameworks.

With a strong academic foundation spanning prestigious institutions including IIT Madras and Cornell University, Michael has built his career at the intersection of technology and business strategy. From his tenure at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to co-founding ventures in edtech and deep tech and later advising C-suite leaders on embedding AI, blockchain, cloud, and data-driven tools into business frameworks, he has consistently worked and excelled at this intersection. Michael has also led technologically transformative projects across the GCC, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and India, empowering companies to enhance operational efficiency, sustainable mining, and supply chain resilience.

Over the past few years, Michael has spearheaded the development of several RegTech solutions, primarily focused on the precious metals and the virtual assets sectors, that have significantly improved the compliance efficiency of AKW’s clients. Michael has also expanded AKW’s bullion-focused full compliance suite as well as lightweight solutions, introducing AI-enabled risk mapping, UBO tracing, sanctions and PEP screening, LLM-based adverse media screening, and onboarding tools with facial recognition and liveness detection capabilities. These solutions help both large gold refineries and small traders, as well as organisations across the UAE’s DNFBP and VA sector, meet the UAE’s strict due diligence requirements. Under his leadership, AKW has also pioneered the development of Gold Fingerprint technology for gold bar authentication, a system that uses deep convolutional neural networks to extract microscopic surface features and convert them into cryptographically secured identifiers, making gold bar counterfeiting virtually impossible.

Michael has also played a seminal role in guiding one of the UAE’s most significant gold tokenisation platforms from concept to launch. Believing in gold’s unique role as both a safe-haven asset and a modern investment vehicle in a world marked by shifting economic and political dynamics, he helped design token frameworks with integrity embedded at the architectural level through compliance-focused smart contracts. His exceptional understanding of economics, finance, and tokenomics is complemented by his leadership in AI innovation. At the same time, he remains profoundly aware of the ethical dimensions of technology, with a strong interest in AI ethics to ensure that emerging solutions are deployed responsibly and transparently, with a deep understanding of their social and human repercussions.

At his core, Michael is driven by the belief that technology, when responsibly applied, can build not just better systems but better futures, for both individuals and organisations. This philosophy also guides his work as a strategic advisor and in his leadership roles.