The Association of French crowdfunding platforms, Financement Participatif France, held the 3rd edition of its annual meeting called Assises de la Finance Participativeon the 29th of March 2016. The event hosted at the Ministry of Finance gathered nearly 500 participants from the ecosystems of traditional and alternative finance. The young (38) French Minister of Economy, Emmanuel Macron –a former banker– was the star of a day packed with interesting panel discussions and crowdfunding platform pitches. He gave a strong and clear speech that included several important regulatory announcements and was overwhelmingly well received.
A Crowdfunding Supporter
Emmanuel Macron applauded the development of the French crowdfunding sector which has doubled in size each year for the past two years. He dismissed critics who view crowdfunding as an insignificant, marginal phenomenon, and expressed, on the contrary, his personal belief that the sector is promised to a great future. The French crowdfunding market may seem small, especially compared to the UK and the US markets, he said, but it still is in its infancy. Crowdfunding matters, he added, because crowdfunding is creating new ways of financing an economy which itself needs to be renewed. The crowdfunding sector acts as he said “an innovation laboratory preparing France for a more open, more technology-based, more decentralized economy.”
Emmanuel Macron believes that crowdfunding succeeds because it meets the needs of both SMBs and retail investors. It allows SMBs to raise finance in ways that were out of reach to them before, such as, for example, using bonds to raise debt. Crowdfunding is also offering to retail investors the opportunity to get better returns while developing a new kind of relationship with the object of their investment. It propagates a new investment philosophy.
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