Banks are crucial enablers of financial and economic development. They have an immense corporate social responsibility (CSR) towards society. Bank´s CSR activities are considered increasingly vital for their own success and sustainable growth, especially as they operate in a business...

With transformative evolution involving crypto-assets, machine learning applications and data-driven finance models, complex regulatory and policy issues are emerging. Inadequate frameworks in FinTech markets create regulatory friction and regulatory fragmentation. These limitations continue to...

In March 2020, Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Most European governments reacted with lockdowns. A drop in demand as well as supply disruptions affected the economy which also hit European banks with quite a lot of uncertainty, not only regarding possible...

Deference mechanisms, such as substituted compliance and equivalence, serve important purposes: They open up markets to foreign service providers, avoid double regulation, and reduce market fragmentation. Yet, their current design also has considerable weaknesses. The biggest of these is that...

The regulatory sandbox is a real world alternative to regulatory lag. Its emergence as a novel regulatory development responds to challenges faced by FinTech innovators in navigating an unwieldy regulatory landscape not designed with FinTech in mind. Regulatory sandboxes are in operation in...

When it comes to banks, disclosure – as a means towards market discipline – can be considered from the standpoint of both Basel's Pillar 3 and (in case of listed banks) the Market Abuse Regulation. Especially in the latter context, it is controversial whether the specific layer of...

A clear trend is evolving as more and more banks and other financial institutions are being successfully sued before the civil courts of the Netherlands for breaches of their special duty of care (‘bijzondere zorgplicht'). Whereas it was initially mainly banks that had reason to worry about...

The paper discusses the most noteworthy measures taken or yet to be taken by the EU to combat the coronavirus crisis. Basically, the measures fall into four categories: (i) flexible application of EU rules that could hinder member states in their strenuous efforts to save their national...

The financial assets that are subject to major European financial legislation (i.e. (designated types of) financial instruments) have traditionally been defined in a largely exemplary and circular manner. The recent proliferation of ‘non-traditional' financial assets, such as cryptocurrencies...

Immediately after the outbreak of the current pandemic crisis, the EU developed a (rather) consistent strategy, by taking measures in order to deal with health emergency needs, support economic activity and employment, preserve monetary and financial stability and prepare the ground for...