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Douglas Arner

Kerry Holdings Professor in Law

Douglas W. Arner is the Kerry Holdings Professor in Law, RGC Senior Fellow in Digital Finance and Sustainable Development and Associate Director of the HKU-Standard Chartered Foundation FinTech Academy at the University of Hong Kong. In addition, he is Associate Dean (Taught Postgraduate and Development) of the Faculty of Law at HKU and co-founder of HKU’s Asian Institute of International Financial Law, as well as Faculty Director and co-founder of the LLM in Compliance and Regulation, the LLM in Corporate and Financial Law, the Law, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship (LITE), and the East Asian International Economic Law and Policy Programmes. Douglas is a Visiting Professor and Senior Visiting Fellow of Melbourne Law School of the University of Melbourne, a non-executive director of NASDAQ and Euronext listed Aptorum Group, an Advisory Board Member of the Global Impact FinTech (GIFT) Forum and of the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE), and co-founder and an executive board member of the Asia Pacific Structured Finance Association. In 2020 he was awarded an inaugural Hong Kong Research Grants Council Senior Fellowship to study the role of digital finance in financial inclusion and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Douglas has published eighteen books and more than 200 articles, chapters and reports on international financial law and regulation, including most recently Reconceptualising Global Finance and its Regulation (Cambridge 2016) (with Ross Buckley and Emilios Avgouleas) and The RegTech Book (Wiley 2019 (Janos Barberis and Ross Buckley). His recent papers are available on SSRN at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=524849 , where he is among the top 50 authors in the world by total downloads, as well as among the top 15 law authors. Douglas led the development of Introduction to FinTech – launched with edX in May 2018 and now with over 100,000 learners spanning almost every country in the world – and the foundation of the edx-HKU Online Professional Certificate in FinTech. Douglas was an inaugural member of the Hong Kong Financial Services Development Council (2013-2019) and Director of the Duke-HKU Asia America Institute in Transnational Law (2005-2016) and has served as a consultant with, among others, the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, UN, APEC, Alliance for Financial Inclusion, and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He has lectured, co-organised conferences and seminars and been involved with financial sector reform projects around the world. Douglas has been a visiting professor or fellow at Duke, Harvard, the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research, IDC Herzliya, McGill, Melbourne, National University of Singapore, University of New South Wales, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Zurich, among others.