Law and FinTech: Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Regulatory Sandboxes

On May 16, 2018, during the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum International and Comparative Law Research Center held the round table on Law and FinTech: blockchain, artificial intelligence, regulatory sandboxes.

In order to unleash the potential of technologies the key elements of legal framework, which hinder the development of innovative finance, shall be worked out as well as domains, in which financial technologies can be efficiently applied. In that way, advantages of distributed ledger technologies (blockchain) are widely applied and broadcasted in the numerous spheres of economic and government control. Distributed ledger technologies can be efficiently applied to activity registers, cloud computing, financial markets and trading, digitalization of data, collective investment schemes (crowdfunding, crowdinvesting) and settlement of accounts.

Nevertheless, up-to-date use of financial technologies might increase costs for business and instigate vulnerability of consumers. Creation of task-designed infrastructure with the aim of implementation of financial technologies is deemed to be the strategic solution. Namely, regulatory sandboxes with self-contained legal regimes can be established providing incentives for cutting-edge businesses along with reasonable adjustments, checks and balances for the consumers’ protection. In particular, legal frameworks worldwide provide diversified adaption of innovative technologies, that worth of being reviewed for the high-quality breakthrough. The leading Russian and foreign experts discussed the use cases and peculiarities of FinTech-favoring legal framework.