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Blending silos : the crowdfunding regulation and the transformation of EU retail financial law
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0165-0750; 1875-8320
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Common market law review, 2025, Vol. 62, No. 2, pp. 409-440
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MORELLO, Filippo, Blending silos : the crowdfunding regulation and the transformation of EU retail financial law, Common market law review, 2025, Vol. 62, No. 2, pp. 409-440 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/92619
Abstract
A recurring narrative around Regulation (EU) 2020/1503 on crowdfunding service providers is that the exclusion of consumer credit from its scope is a missed opportunity. However, despite being fully-fledged capital markets law, the Regulation has significant implications for consumer protection. This is particularly due to the provisions in Chapter IV that protect non-sophisticated investors. By analysing this legal regime, this article shows that, unlike other sources of EU financial law, the Regulation contains contract law provisions that directly affect the relationship between retail investors and platforms. It derives two main implications from this. On the one hand, the Regulation reflects the general trends of the consumerization of EU financial law and the convergence between public financial regulation and private consumer law. On the other hand, the non-sophisticated investor protection regime shows that full harmonization of consumer and financial law is hardly achievable under EU law, where the two are based on two fundamentally different regulatory and contract law paradigms.To substantiate these arguments, this article first traces the development of retail financial law as an increasingly cross-sectoral and standardized body of law. It then shows that the Regulation mirrors this transformation in different directions. Not only are unsophisticated investors substantially protected as consumers when they trade on crowdfunding platforms, but the way in which the Regulation interacts with domestic law and proper consumer law bridges the gap between consumer and financial law. Finally, this article discusses the incompleteness of this transformation and identifies its determinants in the EU’s regulatory attitude towards financial markets.
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Published: April 2025