Prof. Douglas Arner

About me

Douglas specialises in the interlinkages between finance, technology, institutional structures and broader sustainable development. He is the Kerry Holdings Professor in Law and RGC Senior Research Fellow in Digital Finance and Sustainable Development at the University of Hong Kong, and a Research Affiliate and Associate Director - Research Programmes at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. At HKU, Douglas is a Senior Fellow of the Asia Global Institute, Associate Director of the HKU-Standard Chartered Foundation FinTech Academy, a Member of the Management Committee of the Techno-Entrepreneurship Core, and Faculty Director of the Law, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship Programme (LITE). Douglas also holds the Sir Roy Goode Chair at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary University of London.

He is a non-executive director of NASDAQ-listed early-stage biotechnology development firm Aptorum Group, a Senior Fellow of the Program on International Financial Systems and of the University of Melbourne School of Law, a PRIME Finance Expert, an Advisory Board Member of the European Banking Institute, SuperCharger Ventures, Policy 4.0, Alliance for Innovative Regulation, Digital Education Council, and Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE), and co-founder of the Asia Pacific Structured Finance Association. Douglas leads the largest FinTech online course on edX, now with over 130,000 participants drawn from (almost) every country in the world.

He has published twenty books and more than 200 articles, chapters and reports on finance, technology, regulation and development, including most recently FinTech: Finance, Technology, Regulation (Cambridge University Press 2024, with Ross Buckley and Dirk Zetzsche).

He has worked with governments, central banks, financial regulators and international organisations around the world on strategies to support financial sector development.