Technological and economic evolution offers entrepreneurial opportunities that are often accompanied by legal risks caused by the difficulty of interpreting and applying existing regulations.
The innovation that has swept through financial services creating a veritable new industry - fintech - within the financial sphere represents one of the latest and clearest manifestations of this claim.
Crowd-funding, peer-to-peer lending, instant payment systems, blockchain, virtual currencies, cryptocurrencies, and robo-advisor services are just a few of the innovations that have changed the face of the world of financial services in recent years, engaging academics, practitioners, and authorities to find interpretive and regulatory solutions that would allow for consistent regulation of these new phenomena within the current system.
The establishment of a dedicated Focus Team, composed of highly specialized professionals in civil and tax matters, responds to the need to accompany our Clients in the challenges that the ongoing fintech revolution poses on a daily basis. In this task we can act directly or possibly through the involvement of external consultants with whom we collaborate on a permanent basis.
THE CASE OF CRYPTOCURRENCIES
At VEF & Partners we sensed from the very beginning the important economic - and, consequently, legal - relevance that the emerging phenomenon of cryptocurrencies would assume in the social context, even outside national borders. We noticed, however, that in order for the assets thus formed to represent an economic and entrepreneurial resource for the country, it was necessary, first, to bring them back into the system, then, to identify their timely and correct regulation and, finally, on these bases, to allow for regularization by their respective holders (natural or legal persons).
Through this path we have developed strong skills in such a peculiar context, which allow us to assist Clients both in what concerns the entry into legality and the management of cryptocurrencies, as well as in what concerns the start-up and the supervision of intermediation activities in a coveted but, at the same time, potentially insidious sector.
And this to the point of having been able both to define, with the Italian Revenue Agency, the first regularization in Italy of an asset held in cryptocurrencies, and to conclude agreements with leading professional firms, in order to disentangle the possibility for financial intermediaries to face, in the short term, this panorama.
Given these premises, we provide assistance to cryptocurrency holders and issuers, exchange platforms and custody service providers, with reference to the application of the respective tax and fiscal regulations, as well as financial intermediation and anti-money laundering regulations.
