Conference Announcement: A Reality Check on FinTech

On Thursday and Friday, 1-2 December 2022, Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin (Italy) will host the international workshop ‘Financial Technology, Financial Inclusion and Competition Policy: Legal and Economic Approaches’, with the support of the Central Bank of Italy and Università degli Studi di Torino. The event will gather several top-notch legal scholars and economists working on the interplay between financial technology and business law (in particular financial regulation and competition law). The conference will be hybrid. Attendance is free of charge (until full capacity is reached), and registration via this link is required.

The event focuses on the reasons why financial technology (FinTech) has been ranking high in the agenda of policy makers and supervisors around the world for more than five years now. Technological developments are fundamentally changing the way people and merchants access financial services. Traditional business models are facing an increasingly rapid disruption process led by the emergence of FinTech firms and BigTech companies, which provide innovative digitally-enabled banking and financial services. Scholars and regulators have envisaged a large pile of special frameworks that may ease market entry by newcomers while safeguarding consumers.

Innovation hubs and regulatory ‘sandboxes’ provide for a trusted interaction channel as well as experimentation environment allowing new market participants to test their services in the real market with reduced regulatory burden, but under the scrutiny of the supervisor. At the same time, we have been witnessing the development of ‘Open Banking’, whereby banks are required to allow consumer data sharing in favour of third parties willing to provide data-enabled services.

Lastly, crypto transactions have grown to the point that they now form part of the mainstream economy. The involvement of central banks and the possibility of government-backed financial products also raise the question of competition and coexistence between fiat money, CBDCs, crypto assets, and other stablecoins.

After almost five years of intense debate around the promises of financial technology for the financial sector (such as blockchain, financial data sharing, and experimental regulation tailored on FinTech) we want to assess the actual impact of such innovations from a legal perspective. Thus, we gathered a group of top Law & Economics scholars involved in these issues and asked them to carry out a first assessment on whether FinTech delivered on its original promises.

The speakers line-up includes Iris H-Y Chiu (University College London), Leonardo Gambacorta (Bank for International Settlements), Hilary J. Allen (American University Washington College of Law), Edoardo David Martino (University of Amsterdam), Casimiro Nigro (Goethe Universität, CAS on the Foundations of Law & Finance), Markos Zachariadis (University of Manchester), Joshua Macey (University of Chicago Law School), Laura Zoboli (University of Warsaw), Antonella Sciarrone Alibrandi (University of Milano), Edmund Schuster (LSE), Thibault Schrepel (Vrije University), Piotr Tereszkiewicz (Jagiellonian University in Kraków and Cornell University), and Elsa Fornero (University of Turin and CeRP-CCA).

Oscar Borgogno is a Research Official at the central Bank of Italy and TOELI Fellow at University of Turin.

Cristina Poncibò is an Associate Professor of Comparative Private Law at University of Turin.

Giuseppe Colangelo is an Associate Professor of Law and Economics at University of Basilicata.