Short Course on Regulating the Digitisation of the Financial Services Market ('FinTech') (8–12 April 2024)

The course shall enable participants from all jurisdictions to understand, put into context and use the main techniques of financial regulation in the context of the rapidly changing financial market. The further development of the current ‘hot topics’ is an on-going international exercise, and this course enables participants to participate in the relevant debates and understand and shape their home regulatory regime. The combination of general approach and more specialised subject matters will enable participants to navigate through the panoply of existing and projected financial regulation without the necessity to cut through the thicket of very technical provisions. The three key aims of this course are, accordingly:

• Introducing participants to the main theoretical foundations of regulating the increasingly digitized financial services market, including the resulting structural changes, so that they understand the ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘who’, regardless of what concrete regulatory issue they will be looking at in the future.
• Exploring the most important policy areas in the field of regulation of the digitized financial market, all of which are undergoing fundamental overhaul in light of the current market developments.
• Enabling participants to follow and shape the debate around how to regulate digital financial services, be it their role in the financial sector, as legal practitioner, central banker, policy maker, researcher or NGO-representative

Module 1

Digital Financial Services and the Principles of Regulating Financial Markets

• Regulatory rationales
• Changes in market practice in search of higher market efficiency
• Economic functions of products and services
• Regulation as inhibitor and driver of market change

Module 2

The Role of Technology in Providing Financial Services

• Actors, activities and technologies
• Past evolutionary phases
• Enabling technologies (API, Cloud, etc)
• Transformative technologies (AI, Blockchain)
• Technology design and distribution of financial products and services

Module 3 

Regulating neo-banking and platform-linked financial services

• Diversification, specialisation, re-aggregation
• BigTech, datafication and platformisation
• The triangle of financial regulation, competition law and privacy rules
• Limits of the activities and entities-based models
• New regulatory and supervisory approaches
• EU DSA and DMA, Data Act, emerging UK regime

Module 4

Regulating the provision of technical infrastructure

• Internet as infrastructure
• Outsourcing and cloud services
• Systemic stability and new forms of interconnectedness
• Regulating the back end?
• DORA, DMA, DSA, emerging UK regime

Module 5   

Data sharing in financial services - from open finance to open data?

• Rationales for data sharing
• Safeguards for data subjects
• Impact on competitive landscape
• Case studies: PSD2 and the (2023) proposal for a framework for Financial Data Access

Module 6

Mapping the market for digital assets

• Traditional holding patterns and their legal and regulatory framework
• Promises of blockchain/DLT as novel database technology
• Current market practices in issuance and asset servicing
• Mutual governance and decentralised finance (DeFi) models
• Regulatory models: issuer-regimes and VASP-regimes

Module 7

Regulating the digital asset market

• Regulatory rationales and the digital asset market
• Regulatory rationale I: anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing
• Regulatory rationale II: consumer and investor protection
• Regulatory rationale III: market efficiency

Module 8

Regulating the digital asset market (continued)

• Regulatory rationale IV: preserving monetary policy and systemic stability
• The ‘special case’: so-called stablecoins
• Comparative analysis EU, UK, US
• The work of international standard-setters (BCBS, CPMI, FSB)
• Decentralised finance: The challenge of ‘true DeFi’

Module 9

Central bank digital currencies (CBDC)

• Policy drivers
• Design choices and distribution models
• Constitutional issues and the central bank mandate
• Monetary policy interdependencies
• Data privacy challenges 

Module 10

Ethical and stability questions of AI-based financial services

• AI as transformative technology: markets
• Discrimination and the black box
• AI as transformative technology: regulation and supervision (RegTech, SupTech)
• Machine-adapted regulation
• AI and Financial Stability
• EU: AI Act, emerging UK regime

This course concerns the regulation of the digital provision of financial services and the resulting structural market changes. Digitisation is becoming the norm, increasingly being combined with services provided by non-traditional financial market participants, such as giant technology companies. Simultaneously, society increasingly recognises the mechanisms of the financial markets as an enabler for the transformation towards a more sustainable economy. This leads to a situation in which regulation must accommodate structural market change with all associated risks and opportunities, while at the same time the rationales for regulation being extended to cover environmental, social and governance aspects.

In a first part, the course explores general axioms that underly financial regulation of digital finance. In its second part, the course will turn to concrete policy areas, notably regulating structural changes (in particular platformisation, BigTech and new types of infrastructure), regulating issuance of and services relating to digital assets, issuance of central bank digital currencies, and addressing ethical questions of the use of AI in financial services.

The course is internationally oriented and is based on the use of case studies from around the globe. It draws most legal and policy content from standards set by the global committees (FSB, Basel, CPMI, etc.) and from the rules adopted in the EU and the UK, with comparisons to the regulatory debate in the PRC and USA, without focusing in detail on any specific jurisdiction. 

How can I apply, and how long will it take to process my application?

Please submit your registration form to Amanda Tinnams: A.Tinnams@lse.ac.uk. The application form will be processed asap.

How to pay for the course  

Please specify on the registration form who the invoice should be addressed to supplying a Purchase Order number if required. Once full payment has been received your place on the course will be confirmed.  

Course timings

Delivery of the Short Course will be from 10am until 5pm daily.

Will I receive documentation?

You will receive a pack of annotated slides for each module for you to take home.

What are the teaching times?

The course day will run from 10am – 5pm with one hour for lunch.

How do I get to the teaching room?

A campus map and room details will be provided.

Will there be food and drinks?

Refreshments will be provided throughout the day with a one hour lunch break

What if I have special needs or dietary requirements?

Please notify Amanda Tinnams, email: A.Tinnams@lse.ac.uk

Does LSE provide accommodation?

No, but LSE Accommodation may be able to assist. For further information, please contact: Samantha Da Costa, email: residences.faculty.accommodation@lse.ac.uk

Getting to LSE  

For further information, please use the weblink: https://www.lse.ac.uk/lse-information/travelling-to-lse

Cancellation policy

You may make a substitution, giving your place to a colleague, without charge, at any time before the start of the course but all cancellations must be confirmed in writing to Amanda Tinnams, (email A.Tinnams@lse.ac.uk). Cancellations received more than four weeks prior to the start of the course are not subject to any penalty. Cancellation received after that time incur the following penalties: two to four weeks 50% of the course fee, less than two weeks 100% of the course fee. If written notification is not received and you do not attend, the full course fee will be retained as a cancellation charge.

Course Administration

Please contact A.Tinnams@lse.ac.uk for any enquiries.