Crowdfinancing Operations and the Public Interest of the Financial Activity

Crowdfinancing platforms have rapidly emerged and growth since 2001. People around the globe resort to these intermediaries asserting that they give the opportunities and easy procedures that traditional banking lacks.

Currently, many species of crowdfinancing operations are popping up throughout Internet: In addition to the well-known reward-based crowdfunding, we have got sponsorship, equity, real-state, P2P lending, insurance, royalty, factoring, foreign exchange and even crowdfunded cryptocurrency production. Though it is possible to find antecedents of open financing operations along human history, the open global structure of Internet is giving them a complete new scope

On the one hand, it appears to be an excellent mechanism to deal with the open access to credit, which is one elemental pillar of the equality of opportunities in the contemporary world. On the other hand, most of the Constitutions and financial statutes abroad define the financial activity as one of the ‘public interest’. In consequence, States are vested with the jurisdiction to exert surveillance and control over the financial agents and enact special regulations that provide for the risk management mechanisms, funds sufficiency of the intermediary, and specific rules of communications while offering and closing operations.

This paper aims to discuss how crowdfinancing markets are redrawing the access to credit and how the terms and conditions of the platforms’ contracts are drawing transnational financial architectures; whereas States’ strategies remain ineffective to protect the public interest without eliminating the new commercial actuality.