ABSTRACT
Private sector innovation is tricky for regulators at the best of times. New technologies, new players and new effects seemingly emerge from nowhere, carrying unexpected and sometimes hard-to-recognise new risks with them. Regulators can be caught flat-footed, focusing on the wrong things as their assumptions and their jurisdiction prove to be out of sync with actual facts on the ground. Fintech is sometimes described as the digitisation of the financial industry. It is the application of information technology, internet communications capacity, increased computing speed and programming capacity and sometimes ‘big data’ to traditional financial institutional functions, in areas as wide-ranging as corporate finance personal finance and financial management, financial data analytics and investing, mediums of exchange and record-keeping and mobile payments and e-commerce. Fintech also implicates other areas of regulation in a way that pre-crisis financial engineering did not to the same degree.
