Identifying market and regulatory obstacles to cross-border development of crowdfunding in the EU : Executive Summary December 2017

This report identifies potential barriers to cross-border transactions that prevent securities-based and lending-based crowdfunding from scaling up across Europe. We look at the divergent regulatory approaches to crowdfunding across EU Member States, consider microstructural features of crowdfunding that may give rise to transaction costs that are beyond the immediate reach of regulators, and analyse the implications of these features from the perspective of consumer and investor protection and the importance of appropriate disclosures and safeguards. Our analysis draws on extensive desk research on state of the art, in-depth legal analysis of regulatory context in all Member States and with focus on the six most significant national contexts (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK), a bespoke survey targeted at European crowdfunding platforms active in crossborder crowdfunding, an analysis of a combined European user survey, and in-depth interviews with industry executives, regulators and other experts. We find that the European crowdfunding sector is characterised by its highly heterogeneous nature, shaped by the different starting points of nascent national crowdfunding sectors across the EU, and largely determined by the incumbent regulatory frameworks as they pertain to crowdfunding as a novel form of technologically mediated market exchange.