Title: Cross-border development of crowdfunding in the EU – Identifying market and regulatory obstacles to the cross-border development of crowdfunding in the EU
Funding Programme: Tender of DG FISMA – European Commission
Duration: January 2017 – October 2017
Description: This 10-months project supported by the European Commission presented the situation of European cross-border crowdfunding markets and of the regulatory landscape, and identified potential barriers to cross-border transactions across Europe. It also set the basis for the future decision on how to best enable crowdfunding to serve the European economy.
As a very important effect, the project has heavily contributed to the policy discussion on the review of the Capital Market Union action plan, which was released on 8 March 2018, as part of the European Commission’s Fintech action plan.
The project has focused solely on crowdfunding models that entail a financial return, notably:

• Investment-based crowdfunding (where companies issue equity or debt instruments to crowd-investors through a platform)
• Lending-based crowdfunding (where companies or individuals seek to obtain funds from the public through platforms in the form of a loan agreement)

Our role: ECN has coordinated the entire set of activities leading to the publication of the project’s study, including a collaboration with Osborne Clarke and academics coming from the University of Brighton and the University of Piraeus.
Expected results:
Download the final report and the executive summary here.
Project partners:

• European Crowdfunding Network
• Osborne Clarke
• University of Brighton
• University of Piraeus