This book, the third of the Series, gives evidence of how well founded was the choice made by Giacinto della Cananea, myself, and the publisher to launch a collection of comparative law volumes that go beyond the analysis of the usual ‘suspects’. In addition to the excellent survey of Western European laws, this book pays in-depth attention to legal systems – such as those of Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Slovenia, and Poland – which seldom are in the viewfinder of comparative law scholars. But this is by no means the only value added by this book.
Financial consumers’ protection is an issue whose relevance cannot be overstated – at least by anyone who does have access to the financial markets. In recent times, the common belief that traditional Western goals such as making money and thereby improving one’s own lifestyle can be achieved, if not only, then mostly by actual work has been coupled with the idea that financial investments are a good alternative to actual work, or a shortcut to reach those same goals. But the last decades have determined a radical change in the interactions between individuals and their households and the financial markets. Households are now bearing many financial risks that in the past were mostly spread across governments and businesses. In other terms, individuals and households are now to be seen as consumers called upon to share the risks of financial products that are relentlessly put to work in the market by the financial industry. This has placed households at the centre of financial innovation (including algo-finance), further increasing the urgency of regulations promoting legal protection as well as institutional frameworks supporting advice and financial literacy. Such regulations are unlikely to happen – effectively – at the global level. Within Europe, the area covered by the book, the Idealtyp reflected in the EU legislation is somehow two-faced: one side is that of a confident, empowered and active citizen, the other is that of a vulnerable citizen, a stranger to the technicalities of the financial markets and yet encouraged to participate in them.
But legislation is never the end of a legal journey. The book brilliantly shows, in fact, how it is courts and financial ombudsman bodies, at the national and at the EU level, that have over time become the main drivers of legal developments in the protection and empowerment of financial consumers. It is through this analysis of the law in action that the book also sheds light on the value choices made by national and European courts and ombudsman bodies, thereby providing valuable insights into the political dimension of governance and regulation of domains as large as those concerned with financial, banking, and insurance activities.
Under size constraints coming from the publisher and the series’ editors, the editors of the book could not go further. But the volume represents an invaluable platform for further research also on topics closely related to the ones dealt with in the following pages, such as the need of a new design for the civil liability of financial actors, and the relationship between the financialization of daily life and the values of democratic citizenship.
A final note concerns the methodology. The contributions do not follow any specific school of comparative legal scholarships. The comparative law value of the book lies in its illustration of diverse national responses to the same or comparable legal challenges, presenting a comparative survey of national laws focused on the law as actually applied, and thoroughly assessed against the theoretical foundations and structural architectures that characterise each of the legal systems analysed. I like to see in this choice a cultural echo, or even a spin-off of the methodological approach adopted in the last thirty years by the Common Core of European Private Law project, and more recently, by its sister project dealing with European administrative laws. But this is only one of the many reasons to appreciate this book, which, with its fresh perspective on multiple aspects of the financial consumers’ protection, offers a critical contribution to the transnational legal debate on such a crucial domain.
Mauro Bussani