Disruptive innovation creates increasing regulatory challenges. The reason for this is simple: Regulation is usually reactive, responding to facts. However, we currently live in a world of data, not facts. Regulation must therefore be proactive and dynamically responsive to data and trends. This...

A corporate governance model built around hierarchical structures, in which authority and empowerment flows through the board of directors to management and eventually staff, and the board is responsible to shareholders (the owners) of a company, worked well in an era of industrial capitalism,...

The publication of the so-called “Panama Papers” has focused public interest on how elaborate corporate structures and offshore tax havens can be used by politicians, celebrities and other elites to conceal their beneficial ownership of companies and obscure their personal assets. Rather...

In order to encourage meaningful and constructive engagement, countries have promulgated and published stewardship codes. The distinctiveness of such codes is the attempt to create more responsible and purposeful investor engagement. In particular, institutional investors must be viewed – and...

Whenever there is a crisis in the corporate world or the economy more generally, the same questions continue to surface: What is the purpose of a corporation? Is the purpose of a corporation simply to make money? Or do they have a broader role in society? Do corporations also have a social...

Is coronavirus accelerating the future? Will the crisis provide a tipping point that encourages corporations to promote socially desirable values? Will there be a wider recognition that a sole focus on profits and investors hurts both companies and society? Or, will we simply return to...

The entire architecture of contemporary corporate governance is reminiscent of a house of cards. This particular metaphor invokes two ideas that are important for understanding the current state of the debate surrounding corporate governance. Firstly, it captures the fragile facade of corporate...

Advocates of blockchain believe that distributed ledger technologies can provide us with a technological infrastructure to challenge the concentrated power of tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, and create a more equitable, sustainable and decentralized world. This paper considers...

There is something special about venture capital. And this “special something” goes beyond the large financial returns that can come from investing in successful start-ups. At its core, venture capital is about identifying the life-changing innovations of tomorrow and then facilitating the...

Over the last decade, FinTech – broadly defined as the use of new technologies to compete in the marketplace of financial institutions and intermediaries – has disrupted the financial services sector. In this paper, we revisit the question of how banks and regulators should respond.We argue...