445Fintech: A Renaissance moment for Finance and its Regulation?
Despina Chatzimanoli · 2025
The chapter explores claims of a “digital renaissance” in finance. It first sketches a framework of analysis for mushrooming current and emerging technologies and their financial use-cases. Based on this, it identifies the key normative and regulatory challenges brought about by fintech, and the governance practices and regulatory reactions to those challenges. It confirms a renaissance moment for finance and its regulation, in both their “bright” and their “dark” versions. While regulatory challenges are not novel, the generative, composable, and programmable nature of current technology alters the terms of the discussion profoundly, requiring regulators to turn into “Renaissance (hu)mans” balancing multiple public policy objectives. Emerging Web 4.0 technologies are expected to aggravate the trend; while RegTech and SupTech will become indispensable, so will the need to put the human in the center of regulation—probably the highest and noblest Renaissance value of all.