Professor Douglas W Arner

Overview

Douglas W Arner is the Kerry Holdings Professor in Law, RGC Senior Fellow in Digital Finance and Sustainable Development, a Senior Fellow of the Asia Global Institute and Associate Director of the HKU-Standard Chartered Foundation FinTech Academy as well as principal of the Reg/Tech Lab at the University of Hong Kong. In addition, he is Faculty Director and co-founder of HKU’s Law, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship (LITE) Programme, and East Asian International Economic Law and Policy Programme. He is co-founder and former Director of HKU’s Asian Institute of International Financial Law, as well as co-founder of the LLM in Compliance and Regulation, the LLM in Corporate and Financial Law, Douglas served as Head of the HKU Department of Law from 2011-2014, as Director of the Duke University-HKU Asia America Institute in Transnational Law from 2005-2016, as an inaugural member of the Hong Kong Financial Services Development Council from 2013-2019, and as Board Member of the Australian Centre for International Finance and Regulation from 2012-2016.

In 2020 he was awarded an inaugural Hong Kong Research Grants Council Senior Fellowship to study the role of digital finance in financial inclusion and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Douglas is a Senior Fellow of Melbourne Law School of the University of Melbourne, a Visiting Professorial Fellow of the Faculty of Law of UNSW Sydney, a non-executive director of NASDAQ and Euronext listed biotechnology firm Aptorum Group, an Advisory Board Member of the Global Impact FinTech (GIFT) Forum, SuperCharger Ventures, Policy 4.0, the International RegTech Association, the Alliance for Innovative Regulation and of the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE), and co-founder and an executive board member of the Asia Pacific Structured Finance Association.

Douglas has published twenty books and more than 200 articles, chapters and reports on finance, technology, regulation and development, including most recently FinTech: Finance, Technology, Regulation (Cambridge 2024, with Ross Buckley and Dirk Zetzsche), The RegTech Book (Wiley 2019) (with Janos Barberis and Ross Buckley) and Reconceptualising Global Finance and its Regulation (Cambridge 2016) (with Ross Buckley and Emilios Avgouleas). His recent papers are available on SSRN, where he is among the top 40 authors in the world across all disciplines and among the top 10 Law authors by total downloads. Douglas led the development of Introduction to FinTech – launched with edX in May 2018 and now with over 130,000 learners spanning almost every country in the world – and the foundation of the edx-HKU Online Professional Certificate in FinTech, both nominated for the edX Prize and awarded the HKU Teaching Innovation Award.

In addition, he has served as a consultant with, among others, the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, IMF, UN, APEC, Alliance for Financial Inclusion, and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He has lectured, co-organised conferences and seminars and been involved with financial sector reform projects in dozens of countries around the world. Douglas has been a visiting professor or fellow at Duke, Harvard, the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research, IDC Herzliya, McGill, Melbourne, National University of Singapore, UNSW Sydney, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Zurich, among others.