TÜRKİYE VE BAE’DEKİ KİTLE FONLAMA PLATFORMLARINA YÖNELİK YASAL DÜZENLEMELERİN KARŞILAŞTIRILMASI

Abstract

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are crucial for economies in terms of their contributions to gross national product, employment, and innovation. Besides their contribution, the issue of financial inclusion of SMEs has not been solved yet. The unsatisfied needs of SMEs for financing and the improvements in the technological facilities lead to new financial solutions within the scope of financial technologies. Among them, crowdfunding comes into prominence with its enormous growth in the last decade. In this study, the current regulatory framework for the crowdfunding platforms in Turkey launched in 2019 has been analyzed comparatively with the regulation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the most benchmarked jurisdiction in the Middle East and North Africa, in terms of the scope of the crowdfunding platforms, Shari’ah-compliance, the conditions for the entrepreneurs and the investors, and secondary markets. Based on the comparison, the findings imply that the legislative framework of the UAE is more flexible and less restrictive compared to that of Turkey. Although both regulations consist of the same type of conditions for the entrepreneurs and the investors, regulators in Turkey specify each condition with specific limits, while the regulators in UAE only define the types of conditions and charge the platforms with setting the limits and other details. It can be said that the second approach leads to a more competitive crowdfunding market in the UAE.