FinTech: Regulatory Trends and Lessons for the Future

On Tuesday 19 March 2024, the Corporate Law and Financial Regulation program of the Melbourne Centre for Commercial Law hosted a webinar exploring the regulatory trends that have emerged in relation to FinTech over the past 15 years and the lessons for the future. The panel included Professor Douglas Arner (Hong Kong University), Ms Kate O’Rourke (ASIC Commissioner) and Dr Andrew Godwin (Melbourne Law School).

View the event recording

About the speakers

Douglas W. Arner is the Kerry Holdings Professor in Law and RGC Senior Research Fellow in Digital Finance and Sustainable Development at the University of Hong Kong, where he is also a Senior Fellow of the Asia Global Institute, Associate Director of the HKU-Standard Chartered Foundation FinTech Academy and a Member of the Management Committee of the Techno-Entrepreneurship Core as well as principal of the Reg/Tech Lab and Faculty Director of the Law, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreurship Programme (LITE). He is a non-executive director of NASDAQ and Euronext listed early-stage biotechnology development firm Aptorum Group, a PRIME Finance Expert, an Advisory Board Member of the Global Impact FinTech (GIFT) Forum, European Banking Institute, SuperCharger Ventures, Policy 4.0, the International RegTech Association, the Alliance for Innovative Regulation and the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE), and co-founder of the Asia Pacific Structured Finance Association. He leads the largest FinTech online course on edX, now with over 130,000 participants drawn from (almost) every country in the world. Douglas focuses on the interlinkages between finance, technology and broader sustainable development. He 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 University Press 2024, with Ross Buckley and Dirk Zetzsche).

Kate O’Rourke commenced as an ASIC Commissioner for a five-year term on 11 September 2023. She has more than 25 years’ experience in law and regulation across financial services, markets, and corporations. Kate joined ASIC from Treasury, where she held senior leadership positions with responsibility for data and digital economic reforms, COVID economic policy responses, small business policy and regulatory frameworks governing market conduct. Kate previously held senior executive roles at ASIC with responsibility for corporate transactions and governance, and practised in the Sydney and New York offices of the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. She holds Bachelors degrees in Economics (Social Science) and Law from the University of Sydney, a Master of Laws from the New York University School of Law, and an Executive Master of Public Administration from the University of New South Wales.

CHAIR
Dr Andrew Godwin is a Principal Fellow at Melbourne Law School, Joint Associate Director of the Corporate Law and Financial Regulation Research Program at the Melbourne Centre for Commercial Law and Honorary Associate Director (Commercial law) of the Asian Law Centre. He works and researches in the areas of financial regulation, financial services law, corporate and insolvency law, property law, and the regulation of the legal profession. Andrew has published extensively in both academic and professional journals. He is a co-author of Sackville & Neave Australian Property Law and Ford, Austin and Ramsay Principles of Corporations Law, and co-editor of Research Handbook on Asian Financial Law (Edward Elgar, 2020), The Cambridge Handbook of Twin Peaks Financial Regulation (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Technology and Corporate Law (Edward Elgar, 2021). He spent 15 years in practice between 1992 and 2006, including 10 years in Shanghai where he was a partner at Linklaters. Andrew served as Special Counsel and Acting General Counsel at the Australian Law Reform Commission from September 2020 to February 2024. Andrew is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Law and a member of the Advisory Board of the Asian Business Law Institute in Singapore.

VOTE OF THANKS
Professor Rosemary Langford is Harold Ford Professor of Commercial Law, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, where she is Director of Studies of the Commercial Law Masters and Director of the Melbourne Centre for Commercial Law. Rosemary has published widely in the areas of corporate law and corporate governance, including Directors’ Duties: Principles and Application (Federation Press, 2014), Company Directors’ Duties and Conflicts of Interest (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Technology and Corporate Law (Edward Elgar, 2021). She is a member of the Corporations Committee and Not for Profit Law Committee of the Law Council of Australia and of the Law Committee of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, as well as editor of the directors’ duties section of the Company and Securities Law Journal. Rosemary has recently completed a four-year project on governance and regulation of charities funded by an Australian Research Council grant, encompassing comprehensive and comparative investigation of governance and regulation in the charitable sector in a number of jurisdictions with the aim of making recommendations for legislative and policy reforms.