The financial crisis has led to an understandable distrust towards banks and mainstream financial operators and to banks curtailing credit for the weakest part of the real economy. This has also caused the flourishing of non-traditional forms of financial services (such as pawn shops,...

Microfinance is a new, varied and intriguing sector for academics, practitioners and regulators. The current debate about financial sector reforms after the global financial crisis, the recent phenomenon of commercialization of microfinance and related criticism including scandals about...

The European Commission's Proposal for a Regulation on European Crowdfunding Service Providers (ECSPs) for businesses, since its presentation, has faced difficult trilateral negotiations among the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The length of...

The European Commission's Proposal for a Regulation on European Crowdfunding Service Providers (ECSPs) for businesses, since its presentation, has faced difficult trilateral negotiations among the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The length of...

Marketplace lending and investing have been recently attracting increasing regulatory attention. However, regulatory responses to such phenomenon have been extremely varied, even in Europe, characterized by maximum harmonization in the field of financial regulation, continuous efforts in...

The ECSPR covers only financial-return crowdfunding-FRC. Nonetheless, crowdfunding goes beyond monetary incentives: reward-based and donation-based crowdfunding represent the ‘other side of the moon’ in the crowdfunding universe. The Chapter, after describing the main features of...

Crowdfunding has been regarded as a useful tool to meet consumers’ and SMEs’ financing needs as well as investors’ need for diversified alternative investments finance and desire for a more ‘democratic’ financial system. It has also been presented as a form of ‘disintermediated’...