International organizations including the G20, International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the OECD have emphasized the need to move from ensuring access to finance to proper use and quality. They key concept introduce in recent policy papers is the reference to “High Quality Financial Services (HQFS)”. For measuring HQFS, the international organizations propose a number of factors, ranging from access to consumer protection to overall institutional stability.
Financial law and regulation aims at ensuring HQFS. The paper presented in this seminar scrutinizes the international organization’s empirical approach to HQFS from the perspective of a financial lawyer. It identifies institutional, financial and legal/regulatory preconditions for HQFS which are only partly reflected in the empirical approach to HQFS, before reconciling established financial regulatory insights with the HQFS concept introduced by the international organization. It ends with policy considerations on how to modify the HQFS concept to ensure consistency with regulatory experiences around the world. As such it contributes to foundations of financial law research.
SPEAKER
Professor Dirk A. Zetzsche
Head of the Law Department
Professor in Financial Law and ADA Chair in Financial Law (inclusive finance)
University of Luxembourg
Professor Zetzsche is Professor of Financial Law at the University of Luxembourg where he has held the ADA Chair in Financial Law (inclusive finance) since March 2016. He also functions as coordinator of the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance's House of Sustainable Governance & Markets, the Co-Principal Investigator of the Future FinTech National Centre of Excellence in Research and Innovation, and, since Decembre 2024, as the Head of the Department of Law.
Prof. Zetzsche is listed by some rankings as Top 10 law scholar globally. His more than 400 publications focus on corporate governance and shareholder rights, inclusive and sustainable finance, FinTech/RegTech/CorpTech, and collective investment schemes. His latest two books "FinTech: technology, finance, regulation" co-authored with Professors Ross Buckley (UNSW Sydney) and Douglas Arner (HKU) and “The EU Law on Crypto-assets” (co-authored with Dr. Jannik Woxholth) have been published by Cambridge University Press in 2024 and 2025 respectively. His current projects include the fourth edition of his book “The Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive”, a co-authored Article-by-Article Commentary on EU Sustainable Finance Law (to be published with CUP) and a co-authored monograph on Luxembourg investment fund regulation. Further, Prof. Zetzsche co-edits the most extensive corporate law expert commentary available in German language, the “Cologne Commentary on Corporate Law” (24 volumes, 20,000 pp., 4th edition 2020 to 2026), and co-authors a monograph on Inclusive Sustainable Finance Regulation with his standing co-authors, Professors Arner and Buckley (to be published with Oxford University Press).
Prof. Zetzsche advised many of the major regulators and legislators, such as the Financial Stability Board, the Bank for International Settlement, the Basel Committee, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Securities & Market Authority (“ESMA”), the European Banking Authority, the European Systemic Risk Board, the US Securities & Exchange Commission, as well as several central banks and securities regulators. He is currently member of ESMA’s Investment Management Committee and leads the Workstream 2 of the European Systemic Risk Board’s working group on crypto-assets, relating to “indirect exposures to crypto-assets”.
CHAIR
DETAILS
Date: 1 September 2026, Tuessday
Time: 12:00pm to 1:00pm SGT (Registration starts at 11.45am)
Venue: Meeting Room 5-04, Level 5, Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University
[Bento lunch will be provided]
REGISTRATION
Please click HERE to register. Registration closes on 27 August 2026, 12pm SGT or when the workshop is fully subscribed, whichever is earlier.
Successful registrant will receive a confirmation email by 28 August 2026 from ccla@smu.edu.sg to confirm your registration.
