Jonathan McCarthy Returns to Lecture on Digital Finance & FinTech

Jonathan McCarthy will give a lecture in the European and International Business Law LL.M. program on April 11 and 18, titled Digital Finance and FinTech: Law and Regulation, as he did in the last 3 years.

Jonathan is currently the director of the LLM Business Law programme at University College Cork, the co-chair of the Curriculum Committee of the College of Business and Law, and the deputy director for Graduate Research at the School of Law.

Jonathan is a BCL and LLM graduate of UCC, and he was conferred with his PhD degree at UCC in 2018. Jonathan's research interests are primarily in financial law and corporate law. His work is published in international, European and Irish journals. He has previously taught at University of Limerick.

In his lectures, he will discuss developments in digital finance and define FinTech, explain the rationale for regulatory intervention, and explore the implications of specific technologies. The lecture will cover topics such as payments, open banking, and central bank digital currencies; distributed ledger technology, blockchain, and smart contracts; tokenisation and crypto-assets; as well as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced data analytics. It will also address regulatory techniques in digital finance, including sandboxes, innovation hubs, and public–private collaboration, and examine key regulatory frameworks such as the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, the Digital Operational Resilience Act, the DLT Pilot Regime Regulation, and the Artificial Intelligence Act, along with international initiatives and standard-setting efforts.