The fund industry is permanently evolving, but incremental changes are hardly noticed. Sometimes however, industries undergo radical changes, where the process of evolution is significantly disrupted by outside technological, demographic, regulatory, and economic forces. This article discusses...

Currently, there is a dynamic and ongoing improvement in life expectancies that is not accounted for in pension systems designed to provide financial security in retirement.All over Europe, there are currently employment-based (2nd pillar) pension funds and first pillar pay-as-you-go (PAYG)...

European banking law restrictions have so far prevented “alternative lending solutions”, such as debt funds and crowdlending platforms, to operate on a Pan-European scale. Consequently, crowdlending platforms currently do not benefit from a European passport and are restricted in attracting...

The emergence of blockchain, other distributed ledger technologies (‘DLT’) and the potential of asset tokenization has led to a lot of attention in the past three years. Despite ‘ICO scams’ in 2017 and 2018, the use of DLT-based tokens in financial markets has nevertheless kept growing,...

In accordance with the Europe 2020 strategy, long-term finance is a crucial enabling tool for putting the European economy on a path of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth with high employment, and competitiveness for building tomorrow’s economy in a way that is less prone to systemic...

On the 10th of November 2021, the European crowdfunding regulation (“ESCPR”), as well as a related directive to amend Directive 2014/65/EU (“MiFID II”), entered into force. The ESCPR facilitates the scaling up of crowdfunding services across the internal market to increase access to...

In line with the European Green Deal, the EU Action Plan on sustainable finance was adopted in March 2018 as part of the European Capital Markets Union’s efforts to help re-orienting private capital to more sustainable investments. To that end, Regulation (EU) 2019/2088, as amended, (the...