Event: Digital finance, COVID-19 and existential sustainability crises: building better financial systems

30 June 2021, Monday 4:00-5:00 pm HKT | REGISTRATION

Presenter: Professor Douglas Arner

Organized by the Melbourne Law School (The University of Melbourne)

The origins of the 2008 crisis and the current crisis are different: the 2008 crisis was a financial crisis that spilt over into the real economy, while COVID-19 is a health and geopolitical crisis spilling over into the real economy. As such, COVID-19 – a pandemic and an existential sustainability crisis – requires different approaches.

This lecture will explore how COVID-19 experiences are driving forward a range of efforts to build better infrastructure to address future crises, in particular interoperable electronic payments systems (including central bank digital currencies and other forms of sovereign digital currency), sovereign digital identification (particularly in the context of market integrity and non face-to-face transactions), and use of technology for regulatory, supervisory and compliance purposes.

At the same time, digitization generally and of finance in particular driven by the COVID-19 crisis – while providing effective tools to support the response – also raises new challenges, particularly around forms of TechRisk arising from control and use of data from both state and non-state actors. Looking forward, these are among the most significant challenges for policy, law and regulation in the 2020s.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Douglas W. Arner is the Kerry Holdings Professor in Law and Director and co-founder of the Asian Institute of International Financial Law at the University of Hong Kong, as well as Associate Dean (Taught Postgraduate & Development) and Faculty Director and co-founder of the LLM in Compliance and Regulation, LLM in Corporate and Financial Law, and Law, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship (LITE) Programmes.

Prof. Arner talks about building better payment system in the 3rd Episode of his regular “Looking Back, Looking Forward” 2021 series.