Digital Finance and the Law: Innovation, Intermediation, and Systemic Risk

Dear Colleagues,

Digitalisation is reshaping both the delivery and the institutional structure of finance. FinTech firms, BigTech platforms, decentralised protocols, tokenised assets, AI-driven risk models, and central bank digital currency initiatives are challenging traditional forms of intermediation and blurring the boundaries between regulated institutions, technology providers, and market infrastructures. These developments can improve efficiency, competition, and inclusion, but they also create vulnerabilities through operational dependence, data concentration, cyber risk, liquidity mismatches, procyclicality, and cross-border regulatory arbitrage. Their speed and interconnectedness increasingly test legal categories and supervisory tools designed for institution-centred markets.

This Special Issue examines how law can govern the digital transformation of finance without suppressing beneficial innovation or externalising risk to consumers and the financial system. It welcomes doctrinal, comparative, interdisciplinary, and empirically informed contributions on the evolution of financial intermediation; FinTech, BigTech finance, and decentralised finance; regulatory sandboxes and experimental governance; AI, RegTech, and SupTech; digital assets, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies; cyber and operational resilience; and consumer and data protection. Particular attention is given to the macroprudential implications of digital finance, including new transmission channels for systemic risk, regulatory perimeter problems, concentration and interconnectedness, and the adaptation of stress testing, monitoring, and intervention tools.

Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The transformation of financial intermediation and the regulatory perimeter;
• FinTech, BigTech finance, open banking, open finance, and platform finance;
• Regulatory sandboxes, innovation hubs, and experimental regulation;
• Artificial intelligence in finance, RegTech, SupTech, and algorithmic accountability;
• Digital assets, tokenisation, stablecoins, decentralised finance, and MiCA;
• Central bank digital currencies, the digital euro, payments, and monetary sovereignty;
• Cyber risk, operational resilience, and critical third-party dependencies;
• Consumer, investor, and data protection; AML; and financial inclusion;
• The changing architecture of financial risk management, supervision, and accountability;
• Systemic risk, macroprudential policy, stress testing, and new intervention tools;
• Cross-border regulatory cooperation and supervisory coordination.

Dr. János Kálmán
Dr. László Vértesy
Guest Editors

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