Individual investors’ access to crowdinvesting: two regulatory models

Crowdinvesting—raising many small contributions of capital from individual funders via specialized online platforms—is a burgeoning phenomenon. This chapter first highlights the perils to which individual investors are exposed when they access these platforms. Next, it describes the legal regime in two sample jurisdictions, the US with its tradition of high-fixed-cost, disclosure-intensive securities laws that had to be tweaked to make equity crowdfunding viable, and the UK, which has early on provided for a nimble set of rules for the same. Finally, the chapter offers some thoughts on the merits of introducing a lighter regime for equity crowdfunding.