Fintech pioneers navigate the law’s grey areas

Fintech pioneers navigate the law’s grey areas

It is boom time for new financial services. The value of the world’s cryptocurrencies passed a record $2.4tn this year, while the volume of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) sold in the first half reached more than $2.5bn.

The sale of an NFT representing a digital work by artist Beeple for $69.3m at Christie’s made the headlines in March. Payment cards from challenger banks Monzo and Revolut are now in the wallets of 20m customers. But what people seldom see is the army of legal pioneers working to make these services possible.

Lawyers are having to wrestle with new financial concepts against a setting of old legal frameworks. They are operating in grey areas where regulators are still writing the rules.

“It is not your traditional legal service where you are applying templates created by someone else,” says Natalie Lewis, financial services and markets partner at Travers Smith. “This [is] building it from scratch.” She advised Pay. UK, which runs the UK’s money transfer system, on the design and launch of a “request-to-pay” messaging service that allows businesses and consumers to settle bills quickly and flexibly.

“There were no precedents ,” she says. “It meant sitting down with the business and using lots of whiteboards and