Oxford Business Law Blog

The potential of financial technology for innovation and growth is well-established by now. Yet startups often face many regulatory challenges in the early years, obstructing market access...

Trust is an integral aspect of all human relationships. Trust facilitates social cooperation and coordination. Contractual relationships are no exception. Non-legal mechanisms such as reputation and...

Recent technological developments require a reconsideration of intermediated securities holding systems. This post presents two recent papers that examine aspects of this issue. Current intermediated...

Autonomous Systems and the Law (C.H. Beck/Nomos 2019) by Nikita Aggarwal, Horst Eidenmüller, Luca Enriques, Jennifer Payne, and Kristin van Zwieten (eds) is a collection of papers dealing with the...

In our paper ‘Data, Innovation and Transatlantic Competition in Finance: The Case of the Access to Account Rule’, we focus on the EU regulatory effort, enshrined in Directive 2366/2015 on payment...

Debt-based crowdfunding (‘crowdlending’ or ‘peer to peer lending’) is growing as an alternative finance market within the EU. Yet it has many risks for investors. A lack of regulation of the emerging...

In a recent in-depth study commissioned by the European Parliament ECON Committee, we explore the legal and regulatory challenges for the Eurosystem that arise from the startling growth of the market...

Security interests are the building blocks of modern, credit-based economies, and a key component in the quest to promote economic development and sustainable growth. They provide lenders with rights...

A ‘black box’ can be described as a system in which the observable elements entail inputs and outputs, but without any understanding of its internal workings. In other words, the black box is opaque...

FinTech is rapidly transforming the financial services sector. Based on a broad range of different new technologies and innovations, it increasingly attracts the interest of national, global and...

The increasing pace of innovation in technology used for financial and banking services (“FinTech”) both raises alarm bells and brings high expectations. On the one hand, traditional banking players...

Blockchains and the GDPR The imminent entry into force of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coincides with pronounced hype surrounding blockchains as a new method of data storage and...

Crowdfunding is a buzzword that identifies a sub-set in the new forms of finance facilitated by advances in information technology usually categorized as fintech. In contrast to financial innovation...

The rise of financial technology companies (‘FinTechs’) and data-driven financial services providers (‘TechFins’) profoundly challenges the current regulatory paradigm. Financial regulators must...

As financial markets become ever more driven by information technology and artificial intelligence, they also become more susceptible to new methods of market manipulation. With these new methods of...

Crowdfunding - an outcome of the modern sharing economy - has experienced rapid growth in some EU Member States, notably the UK, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. However, home bias by...

Many scholars have called for legal reform to end taxpayer-funded bailouts and crack down on anticompetitive practices by financial institutions. Failure to do so, in an era of fintech innovation,...