金融科技监管与创新的三元悖论

FinTech and the Innovation Trilemma

无论是为了应对智能投顾、人工智能,还是应对比特币等加密货币的兴起,后金融危机时代的各国监管者都将监管迅猛发展的金融科技作为首要政策。然而,将传统监管策略应用于新的技术生态系统仍然存在根本性的困难。文章认为,部分挑战在于管理权衡伴随着监管创新,因为这些创新可能有益也可能损害金融消费者和市场参与者。困境也源于一种普遍认定,即今天的金融科技不过是几个世纪以来金融创新实践的延续。通过展示三元悖论如何不可避免地约束着金融创新的监管,文章为理解和规范金融科技提供了新的理论框架。具体而言,在寻求提供明确规则、维护市场诚信和鼓励金融创新时,监管者长期以来只能实现这三个目标中的两个。此外,由于当下的创新将金融服务供应链分割为不连续的部分,未经检验的前沿技术正对传统金融功能进行去中介化,加剧了历来体现在三元悖论中的权衡困难,从而使得金融风险与收益难以预测。文章对监管机构应对三元悖论采取的策略进行了类型化,认为它们在一系列相互关联的反应中运作,随后提出了一些补充性监管手段,以支持市场监管、监管实验与创新。

Whether in response to robo advising, artificial intelligence, or cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, regulators around the world have made it a top policy priority to supervise the exponential growth of financial technology(or "fintech") in the post-crisis era. However, applying traditional regulatory strategies to new technological ecosystems has proved conceptually difficult. Part of the challenge lies in managing the trade-offs that accompany the regulation of innovations that could, conceivably, both help and hurt consumers as well as market participants. Problems also arise from the common assumption that today’s fintech is a mere continuation of the story of innovation that has shaped finance for centuries. This article offers a new theoretical framework for understanding and regulating fintech by showing how the supervision of financial innovation is invariably bound by what can be described as a policy trilemma. Specifically, we argue that when seeking to provide clear rules, maintain market integrity, and encourage financial innovation, regulators have long been able to achieve, at best, only two out of these three goals. Moreover, today’s innovations exacerbate the trade-offs historically embodied in the trilemma by breaking down financial services supply chains into discrete parts and disintermediating traditional functions using cutting edge, but untested, technologies, thereby introducing unprecedented uncertainty as to their risks and benefits. This article seeks to catalogue the strategies taken by regulatory authorities to navigate the trilemma, and posits them as operating across a spectrum of interrelated responses. The article then proposes supplemental administrative tools to support not only market, but also regulatory experimentation and innovation.