Florian 

GAMPER

Florian is a former English solicitor and an expert in financial regulation. Originally trained as an economist at the London School of Economics, where he gained a BSc and MSc in Economics and Philosophy, he went on to train as a lawyer and worked for one of the UK’s top law firms, Herbert Smith, in London, specialising in corporate law. Subsequently, Florian transferred to management consultancy, specialising in financial services, at a leading financial services consulting firms, Oliver Wyman. There, he covered the breath of financial regulation, e.g. working on Basel III, CRD IV, MiFID II, EMIR, Dodd-Frank, AIFMD, FATCA, UCITS IV / V. Subsequently, he joined the law faculty of the University of Essex as a research officer for financial regulation on a publicly-funded research project to create a big data futures exchange. Florian’s research interests include price formation on exchanges, high frequency trading, derivatives regulation, tax legislation in relation to financial services, law and economics (in particular the application to financial regulation) and the regulation of data trading.

He was also a Researcher with the NUS Centre for Banking & Finance Law between 5 January 2015 to 4 January 2017.

1. Is HFT unfair – a case study of latency arbitrage
High frequency trading is a controversial topic. However, one of the problem in the discussion is that it mixes together different strategies and questions of fairness with questions of efficiency. My research will focus on only one HFT strategy, i.e. latency arbitrage, analysing it from the point of view of fairness. The argument will be made that as far as latency arbitrage only takes advantage of different levels of liquidity it is not prima facie unfair (however, it is probably wasteful from a societal point of view).

2. How to regulate shadow banking? It looks like a bank, it sounds like a bank but is it a bank?
Ever since regulators unleashed a tidal wave of new regulation on the banking industry there has also been an increased attention on shadow banking. Shadow banks have historically been defined as “financial intermediaries that conduct maturity, credit, and liquidity transformation without explicit access to central bank liquidity or public sector credit guarantees” . However, there is a growing tendency among regulators to expand this definition as well as making the definition of what constitutes a bank increasingly vague. My research focuses on producing clear distinguishing factors on what institutions should be regulated as banks and which ones should not. The approach will be to determine which institutions are important for the economy as a whole and crucially which institutions are subject to ‘bank-run’ like risks. This will produce a more precise (and narrower) definition of what shadow banks are.

3. The impact of FATCA on financial institutions? Will there be a 2-tiered world?
This research will analyse the impact on industry structure of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). The argument will be made that FATCA style could lead to the situation where there are essentially two groups of financial institutions in the world, one that is FATCA compliant and one that is not, and these two groups do not transact with each other.
This research would focus on third aspects:
Analysis for kind of financial institutions it would be beneficial to be non-FACTA compliant.
Analysis if there is any evidence that we are seeing a 2-tired world emerging with one set of financial institutions being FACTA compliant and another one that is not.
Analysis how FACTA interacts with other FACTA-style proposed legislation from other countries.

4. The application of big data analytics to the disclosure regime for public companies – a few thoughts
Big data analytics seems to impact all aspects of modern live with the notable exception of the disclosure regime for public companies, which has remained remarkably constant since the 1930s. The disclosure regime puts considerable emphasis (at least in theory) on the materiality of information and making information more intelligible, essentially the aspiration is to have a system of high value but low volume information. This article will argue for the opposite, namely a system where more data is disclosed but that data is not necessarily important or easy to understand i.e. low value high volume data.
This article proposes a disclosure regime in which public companies, in addition to the current disclosure obligation, would also have to disclose the raw data they used to comply with the current obligations. This small change has the potential to have far reaching consequences. Some of the benefits are that investor could decide for themselves how a company’s accounts should be drawn up (rather than having to reverse-engineer it from existing accounts), and big data analytics could be applied more easily to stock markets. The price to pay for this ‘improved’ system is that retail investor could not compete in this market (as they are unlikely to be able to afford the necessary technology to analyse data) and the entire market is likely to be dominated by professional traders. However, this article will argue that this is not only a price worth paying but it is actually a benefit.

5. Credit default swaps and the empty creditor hypothesis – If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
An empty creditor is a creditor who hedges her economic exposure to a borrower through derivatives, most notably credit default swaps, resulting in a creditor with little or no economic exposure to the borrower but retaining all legal rights as a creditor. This has given rise to the Empty Creditor Hypothesis, which claims that empty creditors lead to all sorts of undesirable consequences. This article argues that that the Empty Creditor Hypothesis is best understood as two distinct claims. One claim is that CDSs change a creditor’s incentives to lead to sub-optimal outcomes. The other claim is that CDSs violate the background assumptions on which current corporate and insolvency law is based. With regards to the first claim this article argues if CDSs are analysed within a more general framework taking into account the interaction between lenders, borrows and CDSs sellers, empty creditors are unlikely to be a significant problem. With regards to the latter claim, this paper will argue that it is not the case the CDSs violate the back ground assumptions of either corporate nor insolvency law. Therefore, no intervention by regulators or legislators is required to deal with empty creditors.