Financial Innovation - Crowdfunding: Friend or Foe?

A phenomenon with a considerable past, and with new conspicuous investment models and financial products and services proliferated through the Internet; financial innovation seems to be almost ubiquitous these days. While there are numerous advantages, especially nowadays through the exploitation of easily accessible, low cost and convenient e-commerce platforms, innovation in the finance sector does not come without its perils. Banks and traditional financial institutions are losing chunks of market share to virtual intermediaries and investors are operating in relatively less regulated and, consequently, less secure environments. Furthermore, from the perspective of all stakeholders, there is a Knightian uncertainty component of the long-term ramifications in investing in and through newly developed products and platforms. As such, it is only recently that economic history witnessed the outbreak of the sub-prime mortgage crisis caused by the unraveling of a chain of events interlinked through the imprudent use of "innovative" derivative transactions involving credit default swaps backed by the insatiable appetite of the "irrationally exuberant" investor and the easement of regulation paving the leeway for predatory lending. This paper investigates whether and to what extent innovative investment models such as crowdfunding, as the game-changer, forcing the tightly regulated securities markets to adapt to the rules of the WEB 3.0 era and relieved through the provision, Title III, of the JOBS Act, could be a potential peril. To that end, it discusses the evolution of the equity crowdfunding model in the realm of the technology push - demand pull framework and analyzes the current situation of the market. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).