In recent years we have witnessed an explosion of new types of online markets providing early stage finance from the “crowd” to those who cannot get finance from banks. For example over 40% of early stage financing of start ups in the UK now comes from Equity Crowd Funding. Scale up funding is increasingly provided by companies such as Funding Circle and Octopus Choice. Funding for graduate students in top Universities is over 50% now from sites like Prodigy Finance. In this talk, Nir Vulkan will discuss the reasons behind this and what implications he thinks these could have on the wider finance environment.
Nir Vulkan will then describe in more detail his research into Equity Crowdfunding, where he studies the behaviour of entrepreneurs, unaccredited investors and angel investors and the interplay of all three and what impact this is likely to have for early stage finance in the long run.
Nir Vulkan is the director of the Oxford Programmes on FinTech; Blockchain Strategy and Algorithmic Trading. He teaches the FinTech elective on the MBA and EMBA programmes, and has been involved in the London FinTech scene since it began (around 2007/8) through work with the FCA, start-ups (some set up by his students) and consultancy work to banks, incubators and investors. He also carries out research and has written a number of papers especially on Equity Crowd Funding. He has held a number of roles in Oxford over the last 15 years including the Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurship. His research was used beyond academia: He sold software algorithms for bidding in online auction to HP in 2000. He has been working with Hedge Funds since 2002 developing Algorithmic trading models. He is a member of the Oxford Man Institute (the OMI, set up by Man AHL). He is the author of two books (The economics of e-commerce, Princeton Uni Press 2003, and the Oxford Handbook of Market Design, 2013) and dozens of academic papers on both these areas.