This chapter analyses the drivers of the digital financial transformation. We argue that the digital transformation of finance has been driven by the quests for (i) efficiency, (ii) financial inclusion, and (iii) sustainability. These three factors are necessarily intertwined: financial inclusion underpins long-term oriented economies, and sustainable yet inefficient and unprofitable services are doomed to fail.

This contribution discusses some critical aspects of the upcoming Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) Regulation. There is already extensive and comprehensive literature on the MiCA proposal, and the scope of these brief notes is to consider some – necessarily not all – of the issues that MiCA (as it stands in the original proposal) raises, and that might be considered in the next steps of the legislative process. In particular, we discuss the relationship between MiCA and MiFID-Prospectus rules, the issues raised by DeFI, tokenisation of assets, and some general commercial and civil law aspects.

This chapter traces the incredibly rapid expansion of the platform e-commerce and financial conglomerates Alibaba and Ant Group. It shows how they took advantage of government fragmentation and dependence on the private economy to attract huge foreign investment, using the variable interest entity (VIE) legal loophole, and then to diversify into payment services (Alipay) and finance in conjunction with state financial institutions, attracting hundreds of millions of customers and tens of millions of SME merchants. The chapter analyzes the key struggles between this Alibaba/Ant "corporate ecosystem" and government regulators seeking to protect consumers, finding that reports of a reining in of Chinese private firms by the Chinese Communist Party are premature.