The Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance (GECA) has reached 100 member organisations, completing The First 100: the founding members of the global regulated crowdfunding conversation. Here is where we came from, what this community has built, and the programme now underway to shape the industry’s next decade.

What is the Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance?

is the trusted convener for the worldwide regulated crowdfunding community. It is the global room where crowdfunding platforms, regulators, technology providers, industry associations, researchers and academics exchange ideas, share best practice, and advance the industry together through year-round collaboration and coordinated action.

While equity crowdfunding is in our name and at our heart, GECA’s community spans the full breadth of regulated crowdfunding: equity, real estate, peer-to-peer lending, debt, bonds and beyond. Wherever everyday investors fund businesses and projects through regulated online platforms, that is our industry, and it is one industry.

Regulated crowdfunding is how thousands of businesses and projects around the world now raise capital from the communities that believe in them. But for most of its history, the industry has been fragmented: national markets solving identical problems in separate rooms, regulators writing rules without hearing what worked elsewhere, and platforms reinventing what a peer on another continent had already perfected. GECA exists to change that.

Where GECA came from

GECA began as a conversation between a handful of believers who shared one conviction: that regulated crowdfunding is a global industry that behaves like a local one, and that it would move faster the moment it started talking to itself.

There was no grand launch budget and no legacy institution behind it. There was a shared belief, a growing network of practitioners willing to show up for each other, and a simple promise: convene the industry, globally, properly, for the long term.

One hundred organisations later, that promise has a membership.

Who are The First 100?

The First 100 are the founding members of GECA, and they span every corner of the industry and the globe: crowdfunding platforms across equity, real estate, lending and debt that have collectively raised billions, national and regional crowdfunding associations, regulatory and policy voices, the technology providers building the industry’s infrastructure, data and research specialists, law firms, service providers, and academic institutions studying how community capital works.

Market leaders sit alongside emerging platforms. Voices from the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe sit alongside members from Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas. Every one of them now holds permanent Founding Member status, numbered #1 through #100, recognised for as long as GECA exists.

What has GECA achieved so far?

In a remarkably short time, this community has built real convening infrastructure for the industry: a Steering Committee bringing together some of the most respected voices in global crowdfunding, global think tanks convening cross-border conversations, an AI Governance Task Force examining how artificial intelligence changes crowdfunding operations, compliance and investor experience, the Global Pulse briefing tracking regulated crowdfunding developments around the world, the GECA Podcast featuring the people shaping the industry, regular industry newsletters, and a growing presence on the world’s stages, from Belgium to Málaga, Los Angeles to Washington DC.

Behind the headlines sits the quieter achievement: week after week of member conversations where a platform in one market learns from an identical problem solved in another, where practitioners compare what actually converts investors, and where the industry’s collective knowledge compounds.

What is GECA launching next?

Reaching 100 members isn’t the finish line. It’s the operating scale GECA was built for, and the programme now underway is the most ambitious in the alliance’s history.

Two new task forces. Following the AI Governance Task Force, GECA is launching a PR and Media Task Force to champion the industry’s story to the wider world, and an Institutional Funding Opportunities Task Force to explore how institutional capital can participate in regulated crowdfunding at scale, one of the industry’s biggest unlock opportunities.

More of what members value most. Regular and timely podcast episodes, the industry bulletin tracking developments worldwide, and GECA Happenings keeping the community connected to everything the alliance is doing.

And one flagship programme to set the industry’s agenda:

The Future of Crowdfunding Initiative 2026–2027

GECA is convening the global industry around one question: what will crowdfunding look like in five years? The initiative runs in four stages, culminating in a definitive global report.

Stage 1: Conversations on the Future of Crowdfunding (from August 2026). A roundtable series convening leading voices across three big questions:

1. What industries are best suited for equity crowdfunding? Sector performance data, the fastest-growing markets, and what different jurisdictions can learn from each other.
2. What makes a successful crowdfunding ecosystem? Comparing markets, regulation, platform models, cross-border investment and secondary markets around the world.
3. How do we unlock the next decade of crowdfunding? AI, institutional investment, retail participation, platform collaboration, and what would create 10x growth.

Stage 2: The Global Industry Survey (September-October 2026). A Delphi-style research exercise, GECA’s largest primary research to date, drawing on its 100+ members and supporters worldwide. Experts complete an anonymous survey, findings are aggregated and shared back, participants refine their views, and areas of consensus and divergence across regulation, technology, investor behaviour, consolidation, cross-border activity and institutional participation are identified. Participants will be featured and positioned in the final report.

Stage 3: The Findings Webinar (late 2026). A global webinar presenting the results, exploring where the industry agrees, where it diverges, and what it means for the decade ahead. GECA also expects to present emerging findings at in-person industry events in the USA and Germany in October and November 2026.

Stage 4: The Future of Crowdfunding Report (Q1 2027). A flagship global thought leadership report combining the Delphi findings, regional perspectives and expert commentary: the definitive picture of where regulated crowdfunding is heading, built by the industry itself.

No single market can see the whole picture of this industry. One hundred member organisations across every continent and every crowdfunding vertical can. That is precisely what a global convener is for.

Why does 100 members matter?

Because convening only works at scale. A conversation between five platforms is a call. A conversation between 100 organisations spanning platforms, regulators, technologists and researchers on every continent is an industry talking to itself, and an industry that talks to itself gets better, faster, everywhere at once.

It matters for founders and project owners, because a coordinated industry means more capital moving across borders to the businesses that deserve it. It matters for investors, because shared standards and shared learning mean better protection and better opportunities. And it matters for regulators, because they now have one global community to engage rather than a hundred fragmented voices.

Join the next 100

Founding status is closed, but the conversation is wide open. The next 100 members join at the most exciting moment in GECA’s history: a seat at the roundtables, a voice in the Global Industry Survey, and a place in the research that will define the Future of Crowdfunding Report. If your organisation builds, regulates, powers, studies or serves regulated crowdfunding anywhere in the world, the room is open.

The Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance is the trusted convener for the worldwide regulated crowdfunding community. Learn more at https://thegeca.org , listen to the GECA Podcast at https://thegeca.org/podcast/ , and follow GECA on LinkedIn and X.

Originally published at https://thegeca.org on July 10, 2026.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future conversation for the crowdfunding industry. It is already here.

Equity crowdfunding platforms and alternative finance providers are beginning to use AI to review deals, streamline due diligence, manage compliance workflows, engage investors, and scale their operations. The potential is enormous: faster processes, lower costs, more consistent quality, and better experiences for founders and investors alike. For a sector built on making capital more accessible, these are not small gains.

But alongside the opportunity sit important questions. How do crowdfunding platforms adopt AI without losing accountability? What does human oversight of AI actually look like in practice? How should the industry respond to emerging AI regulation, including the EU AI Act? And how do we make sure that trust, the foundation this entire sector is built on, is strengthened by these tools rather than eroded?

These are the questions the Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance (GECA) believes the industry should be answering together. Which is why we are launching our first official Task Force: the GECA AI Governance Task Force.

What is the GECA AI Governance Task Force?

The GECA AI Governance Task Force is a global industry initiative that brings together expertise from across the crowdfunding ecosystem to develop practical approaches to responsible AI adoption. It is the first official Task Force launched by the Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance, the industry body for equity crowdfunding worldwide.

That word “practical” matters. There is no shortage of theoretical discussion about AI in financial services. What crowdfunding platforms actually need is guidance grounded in real-world experience: what works, what to watch out for, and how organisations of different sizes and jurisdictions can adopt AI tools with confidence.

Rather than prescribing solutions, the Task Force will provide a forum for discussion, knowledge sharing, and the development of practical guidance informed by a broad range of perspectives. It will begin with a focused group of founding participants drawn from different regions, organisations, and disciplines. Over the coming months this group will establish the Task Force’s priorities, objectives, and programme of activity, before participation is opened up more broadly across the GECA community.

Who is chairing the Task Force?

The GECA Steering Committee has appointed Neera Patel, Chief Product Officer at Dacxi Chain, to chair the AI Governance Task Force.

Neera brings extensive experience at the intersection of technology, product development, data, and artificial intelligence. She is deeply involved in the practical application of AI in financial services and advocates for ensuring that innovation is accompanied by appropriate governance, transparency, and oversight. Known for combining strategic thinking with hands-on implementation, she champions approaches that help organisations harness the benefits of AI while maintaining trust, accountability, and regulatory awareness.

“I’m excited to be leading the GECA AI Governance Task Force at a time when AI is rapidly evolving how organisations function, remain competitive, and serve their customers,” Neera said. “The opportunity ahead is not simply to discuss AI, but to help the industry explore how it can be adopted responsibly, effectively, and in ways that create genuine value. By bringing together expertise from across the crowdfunding ecosystem, we have an opportunity to learn from one another, identify common challenges, and develop practical frameworks and guidance that can benefit the wider community.”

Andy Field (MCIM), GECA Steering Committee Lead, sees the Task Force as a milestone in the Alliance’s evolution.

“Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the most important topics facing our industry,” he said. “It has the potential to transform how crowdfunding platforms operate, optimise their processes, engage with investors, assess opportunities, and scale their businesses. At the same time, there is a clear need for thoughtful discussion around governance, transparency, and best practice. The creation of Task Forces is an important step in GECA’s evolution, allowing members and supporters to collaborate on issues that matter to the future of the ecosystem. We are delighted that Neera has agreed to lead this first initiative.”

Why does crowdfunding need AI governance now?

The timing is not accidental. AI regulation is moving: the EU AI Act is introducing new expectations around transparency, human oversight, and accountability for AI systems used in financial contexts. Crowdfunding platforms are moving too, with many already experimenting with AI in deal review, due diligence, and compliance operations. The gap between adoption and governance is exactly where risk lives, and closing that gap is a job no single platform can do alone.

An industry that gets AI governance right earns something valuable: the confidence of investors, founders, and regulators that innovation in equity crowdfunding is being handled responsibly. An industry that gets it wrong risks the trust that everything else depends on.

That is the work ahead.

What happens next?

The Task Force will spend its formation period defining priorities and its programme of work. Following that, additional members and supporters will be invited to join, creating a diverse working community of experts from across the global crowdfunding and alternative finance ecosystem.

This is the first of a number of initiatives designed to encourage greater collaboration, knowledge sharing, and industry leadership across the global crowdfunding community. Further details on the Task Force’s objectives, membership, and future activities will be announced in the coming months.

If you would like to learn more about the initiative, or register interest in future participation, follow GECA’s updates or get in touch through thegeca.org.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is the GECA AI Governance Task Force? The GECA AI Governance Task Force is a global industry initiative launched by the Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance to help the crowdfunding sector adopt artificial intelligence responsibly. It brings together experts from across the industry to share knowledge and develop practical guidance on AI governance, transparency, and human oversight.

What is GECA? GECA is the Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance, the industry body for equity crowdfunding worldwide. It connects crowdfunding platforms, industry experts, and supporters across the globe to encourage collaboration, knowledge sharing, and industry leadership. The AI Governance Task Force is GECA’s first official Task Force.

Who chairs the GECA AI Governance Task Force? Neera Patel, Chief Product Officer at Dacxi Chain, has been appointed Chair by the GECA Steering Committee. She brings extensive experience in technology, product development, data, and the practical application of AI in financial services.

Why does the crowdfunding industry need AI governance? Crowdfunding platforms are increasingly using AI for deal review, due diligence, compliance, and investor engagement. Without appropriate governance, transparency, and human oversight, this adoption creates regulatory and trust risks. Emerging regulation such as the EU AI Act is also introducing new obligations for AI used in financial contexts, making industry-level guidance increasingly important.

What will the Task Force actually do? The Task Force will provide a forum for discussion, knowledge sharing, and the development of practical guidance on responsible AI adoption in crowdfunding. It begins with a founding group of participants from different regions and disciplines who will define its priorities and programme of work, rather than prescribing solutions from day one.

How does the EU AI Act affect crowdfunding platforms? The EU AI Act introduces expectations around transparency, human oversight, accountability, and documentation for AI systems, with implications for AI used in financial services. Obligations phase in over time, and platforms using AI in their operations will need to understand which requirements apply to them and when. Exploring practical approaches to this is part of the Task Force’s remit.

Can my organisation join the GECA AI Governance Task Force? The Task Force is beginning with a focused founding group. Once its priorities and programme are established, participation will be opened more broadly across the GECA community. Organisations interested in future participation can register interest through thegeca.org Or email Andy Field (MCIM) Andy Field — Andrew@thegega.org

Originally published at https://thegeca.org on July 6, 2026.

UK Crowdfunding Association Chair and Co-founder of Britain’s First Regulated Crowdfunding Platform Brings Two Decades of Retail Investor Advocacy to GECA’s Borderless Mission

The Barn in Buckinghamshire

In 2003, while traditional banks treated retail savers as deposit-holders rather than participants, a small group of fintech refugees from egg Bank were meeting weekly in a Buckinghamshire barn. Frustrated with where consumer finance was heading, they began sketching something radical: a market where ordinary people could lend directly to each other, without a bank standing in the middle.

That conversation became Zopa — the world’s first peer-to-peer lender. Bruce Davis was one of the people in that barn.

More than two decades later, that same conviction — that retail investors deserve genuine access to investments traditionally reserved for the wealthy — has defined a career spanning Zopa, Abundance Investment, the UK Crowdfunding Association, academic research at Leeds University, and direct policy engagement with HM Treasury and the FCA.

Now, GECA welcomes Bruce Davis as Strategic Advisor for the UK, bringing the regulatory experience, retail investor advocacy, and institutional credibility that few people in global crowdfunding can match.

Building the UK’s First Regulated Crowdfunding Platform

In 2009, Bruce and co-founders Karl Harder and Louise Wilson walked through the doors of the Financial Services Authority with an unusual request: they wanted authorisation to launch a brand new regulated retail investment platform. It was the start of a new wave of newly authorized firms who together went on to create the world’s first regulated crowdfunding market.

Three years later, in April 2012, Abundance Investment launched as the world’s first regulated crowdfunding company. From a £5 minimum investment, ordinary people could now lend directly to renewable energy projects, local authorities, and green infrastructure across the UK.

Over the following decade, Abundance raised more than £150 million from thousands of retail investors for over 60 sustainable infrastructure projects — including wind, solar, tidal, EV charging networks, sustainable forestry, and green social housing. In 2020, Abundance pioneered Community Municipal Investments, allowing UK councils to issue green bonds directly to their citizens. By March 2026, 20 councils had used the platform to finance net-zero projects, with £20 million mobilised from more than 3,000 retail investors for council green bonds alone.

The platform became a B Corp in 2020 and won the Ashden Gold Award in 2014 for “Powering Clean Energy Investment.”

The Regulatory Voice

In January 2024, Bruce was appointed Chair of the UK Crowdfunding Association — the trade body he had helped found years earlier as a founding director. Under his chairmanship, the UKCFA has become an increasingly vocal advocate for proportionate regulation in a market that he argues has drifted into over-restriction.

In December 2024, Bruce wrote directly to Tulip Siddiq, then Economic Secretary to the Treasury and City Minister, making the case in unsparing terms:

“The UK is now seen as having one of the most highly regulated markets for this type of investment in the world — overtaking even the US which has long been a laggard on supporting the benefits of crowdfunding. The impact of these changes has been felt in the increase in marketing costs for new issuance of investments, which in some cases have become uneconomic and left platforms reliant on the existing investors.”

That diagnosis — that excessive regulation is now choking the very industry the UK pioneered — sits at the heart of why Bruce’s GECA appointment matters.

“There are plenty of people who can talk about retail crowdfunding in the abstract. Bruce has actually built it — first at Abundance, and now through his leadership at the UKCFA,” said Andy Field, GECA Steering Committee Executive Lead. “He’s been inside the regulatory conversation in the UK for longer than most of the global industry has even existed. His December 2024 letter to Treasury was a reminder of why we need voices like his at GECA: people who will speak plainly about what’s working, what isn’t, and what proportionate regulation looks like in practice. We’re delighted to welcome him.”

“The UKCFA has been flying the flag for creating a world where more people invest in more of things they care about — and access investments which previously were the preserve of the wealthy and finance institutions,” the association has stated under his leadership. “If the UK is going to bridge the productivity gap it needs a diverse and vibrant crowdfunding sector to reach the SMEs that conventional sources of finance cannot reach.”

Anthropologist, Author, Academic

Bruce’s perspective on money is distinctive because he didn’t come up through banking or finance. He read Classics at university and worked as an anthropologist for over 15 years — studying how people use money in everyday life, rather than how finance professionals and economists assume they do.

That research foundation helped shape Zopa’s original concept as “an eBay for money”, Abundance’s product approach, and his ongoing work as Visiting Research Fellow at the Bauman Institute at Leeds University, where he co-authored Crowdfunding and the Democratisation of Finance (Bristol University Press, 2021) with Professor Mark Davis.

He’s also responsible — improbably — for inventing Monkey Shoulder whisky and helping to launch Sailor Jerry Rum. The through-line, Bruce has explained, is anthropology: understanding what people truly value in their everyday lives, rather than reducing them to mechanistic consumers of products.

Why This Appointment Matters for GECA

Bruce’s appointment lands at a critical moment. The UK pioneered regulated retail crowdfunding in 2012, but the regulatory pendulum has swung. Bruce’s UKCFA work targets a re-balancing: keeping investor protections robust while removing the marketing-cost barriers and authorisation complexity that have made new platform entry unattractive and potentially uneconomic.

That re-balancing challenge is precisely what GECA exists to coordinate globally. Fragmented national rules, inconsistent disclosure standards, and incompatible authorisation regimes are the friction points stopping equity crowdfunding from fulfilling its borderless potential.

“GECA’s work only progresses if we can connect global coordination ambitions to the real regulatory conversations happening at national level,” Field added. “Bruce is one of a small number of people in the world who can bridge those two altitudes — the macro vision of a borderless ecosystem, and the granular detail of FCA rule-making. That’s exactly the kind of strategic depth we want around the table.”

Looking Ahead

“I’m honoured to join GECA at this point in the industry’s evolution,” Bruce said. “The case for crowdfunding has always been about giving more people access to investments in the things they care about. That argument doesn’t stop at national borders. If we get the regulatory architecture right — proportionate, evidence-based, and harmonised — we can unlock capital flows that conventional finance simply cannot reach.”

With Bruce’s appointment, GECA gains direct connectivity to the regulatory dialogue shaping one of the world’s most influential crowdfunding markets — and a steering committee member whose career has been defined by the conviction that retail investors belong at the centre of capital markets, not at the margins.

Join GECA

The state of global equity crowdfunding — May 2026 Pulse

Three developments are reshaping our industry, and the GECA Steering Committee is watching all of them closely.

1. The UK rewrote the rulebook in January — and the first trades are now happening.

The FCA’s Public Offer Platform regime came into force on 19 January 2026, alongside the broader Public Offers and Admissions to Trading Regulations 2024. Public offers of £5M or more to a broad investor base must now be made through an FCA-authorised POP.

In parallel, PISCES went live. JP Jenkins ran the first PISCES trade on 24 February 2026 with QPlay. On 25 March 2026, the London Stock Exchange’s Private Securities Market held its inaugural auction — shares in a Luxembourg TPEIC backed by Oxford Science Enterprises (£1.3bn). Crowdcube is the Registered Auction Agent providing access for eligible retail investors, alongside sophisticated and institutional participants.

The UK now has live, regulated infrastructure for both primary public offers above £5M and intermittent private secondary trading. The EU should be paying attention — particularly anyone advocating for ECSPR Article 45 secondary-market provisions.

2. European equity crowdfunding grew while the wider macro picture turned.

The European equity crowdfunding market raised €280M in 2025 across 354 campaigns, involving more than 68,500 investors — a 12.2% increase on 2024. France led with €98.3M across 106 campaigns, equal to 35.2% of the European total.

A standout campaign: Bitstack opened on Crowdcube on 24 March 2026, passed €1M invested within five minutes, hit its $2M target in 20 minutes, and closed above $4.5M within 24 hours with more than 8,000 individual investors — a European record for a Crowdcube campaign opening.

3. The EU AI Act compliance question just got more complicated, not less.

The Act’s high-risk system obligations are currently scheduled to apply from 2 August 2026. Annex III high-risk classifications include AI systems used for creditworthiness assessment, credit scoring, and insurance risk pricing — directly relevant to crowdfunding platforms doing automated suitability or risk-scoring. Penalties for breaches reach €15M or 3% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher (Article 99).

However, the EU has provisionally agreed to extend the stand-alone high-risk system deadline to 2 December 2027, with formal Parliament and Council adoption expected by July 2026. Until that adoption is confirmed, platforms must continue preparing for an August 2026 effective date — but the policy ground is genuinely moving.

This is one of the reasons GECA announced the formation of an AI Task Force in May 2026. More on the Task Force’s remit and membership in due course.

A milestone worth marking: Reg CF turns 10

May 2026 marks ten years since Regulation Crowdfunding went live in the United States. The exemption that began on 16 May 2016 has matured into one of the most important pieces of inclusive capital-formation infrastructure anywhere in the world.

According to research from Crowdfund Capital Advisors, Reg CF has now attracted companies from over 620 industries, with offerings recorded across more than 1,750 US cities and all 50 states — plus Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. Around $7.5 billion in economic stimulus has been generated through business expenditures, with the majority of that spending staying local. Fourteen firms that raised on Reg CF have since pursued IPOs, and 71 have been acquired. 63% of recent issuers are post-revenue and over three years old — a maturing, lower-risk profile of the businesses now choosing the exemption. CCA reports a 69% success rate for funded campaigns, higher than most other forms of early-stage financing.

Sherwood Neiss of Crowdfund Capital Advisors, one of the architects of the original legislation, has observed that Reg CF is “ushering in a new era of liquidity, increased venture participation, and a maturing issuer profile,” with “more revenue-generating and less risky companies entering the market.” Ten years in, that thesis is being borne out by the data.

Sherwood and the CCA team continue to advocate for the next phase, including a Petition for Rulemaking filed with the SEC in January 2026 to raise the Reg CF cap to $20 million, indexed for inflation.

For GECA, the ten-year US milestone is more than a national anniversary. It is proof that retail-accessible, regulated equity crowdfunding works at scale, across cycles, and across regulatory regimes. The infrastructure being built today in the UK, the EU, APAC, and beyond stands on the shoulders of that ten-year track record.

What this also means for the wider infrastructure picture

On 20 April 2026, the Hong Kong SFC launched a regulated framework for secondary trading of tokenised SFC-authorised investment products on licensed Virtual Asset Trading Platforms, initially scoped to tokenised money market funds.

On 5 May 2026, Republic launched tokenised Animoca Brands equity on Solana, with underlying ordinary shares custodied by BitGo Bank & Trust and secondary trading facilitated via INX Securities (an SEC-registered broker-dealer and ATS operator).

Different regulatory frameworks, same direction of travel: tokenised equity infrastructure moving from concept to live, regulated secondary trading.

For platforms operating across borders, the compliance map keeps expanding — UK POP, ECSPR, US Reg CF / Reg A+, ASIC CSF, and an EU AI Act layer on top. This is why GECA exists.

Sources verified: FCA PS25/10 · Crowdfund Insider · Charles Russell Speechlys · Mishcon de Reya · Reuters · Startupbusiness.it · Bitstack/Roubaud LinkedIn · Crowdcube LinkedIn · EU AI Act official text (Article 99, Annex III) · Latham & Watkins · DLA Piper · SFC Hong Kong · Republic LinkedIn · Tokenizer.estate · Crowdfund Capital Advisors (cumulative Reg CF research) · Sherwood Neiss LinkedIn (SEC Rulemaking Petition, January 2026)

#EquityCrowdfunding #PISCES #ECSPR #EUAIAct #GECA #FinTech #CapitalMarkets #PrivateMarkets

Twenty Years of Crowdfunding Led to a Key Question in Spain

A Provocative Question

“After 20 years of crowdfunding, one question keeps coming back: Are we transforming finance… or just digitizing existing models?”

As part of an expert panel, Ronald Kleverlaan during the 5th International Conference for Alternative Finance Research (ICAFR) in Málaga posed this challenge, and it seemed to resonate across three days of discussions between 86 academics, platform leaders, regulators, and technology providers from across Europe and the USA.

The answer, it turns out, is both more interesting and more uncomfortable than the industry might want to admit.

The Mirror We Held Up

ICAFR brought together crowdfunding’s pioneers — the people who built the industry from scratch starting in the mid-2000s — for a rare moment of collective reflection. What they saw wasn’t quite what they expected.

Crowdfunding has scaled. Billions in capital raised globally. Established ecosystems in multiple jurisdictions. Professional operations replacing scrappy experimentation. Regulatory frameworks where once there was only uncertainty.

But Ronald Kleverlaan’s question during the panel discussion on “After 20 Years of Crowdfunding, What to Expect in the Next 20 Years to Come” surfaced an uncomfortable truth: crowdfunding has grown by becoming more like traditional finance, not by replacing it.

As Kleverlaan put it: “Crowdfunding has scaled by adopting familiar models: lending structures from banks, equity models from venture capital. This has helped the industry grow. But it may also limit its future potential.”

The industry is still largely financing the “old economy.” Platforms don’t seem to be adapting fast enough to support new types of organizations emerging in society — cooperatives, steward-owned businesses, community-owned enterprises, social enterprises. These organizations follow different lifecycles than traditional startups, but crowdfunding platforms still evaluate them using venture capital logic.

The question that Tim Wright posed to the panel cut deep: Have we truly transformed finance, or have we simply digitized it?

What’s Actually Holding the Market Back

Andy Field, Karsten Wenzlaff, and Konstantin Boyko co-hosted GECA’s Platform Leaders Workshop at ICAFR, bringing platforms, technology providers, and ecosystem participants into focused discussions on operational realities.

The core challenges became clear quickly:

Trust and Deal Quality — Platforms still struggle to prove governance and diligence standards in ways that travel across borders. Investors want assurance. Regulators want evidence. Platforms lack shared infrastructure to provide either at scale.

Platform Economics — As Konstantin Boyko noted in his reflection: “Raising from the crowd is often even more expensive and time-consuming [than traditional methods], making long-term sustainability challenging.”

Liquidity — Secondary markets remain theoretical for most platforms. Investors are locked in. Exit options are limited. This fundamentally limits who can participate and how much capital they’ll commit.

Cross-Border Friction — Every jurisdiction operates in isolation. Deals don’t travel. Investors can’t participate across borders. Platforms duplicate infrastructure rather than coordinate.

These aren’t new problems. But what was apparent at ICAFR was the industry’s willingness to identify them directly — and discuss the notion that technology alone won’t solve them.

The Community Power Gap

The most provocative insight came from examining what crowdfunding platforms aren’t doing.

Ronald Kleverlaan pointed to energy cooperatives across Europe that successfully raise capital directly from citizens — without using crowdfunding platforms. “Somehow crowdfunding platforms are not able to offer the right services for them,” he observed.

Think about that. The organizations most aligned with crowdfunding’s original promise — citizen participation, community ownership, shared value creation — are bypassing the platforms entirely.

Why?

Because platforms optimized for transaction efficiency, not community building. They copied venture capital’s deal-by-deal model instead of building ongoing relationships between organizations and their supporters.

As Konstantin Boyko reflected: “The real innovation would be to build a model where raising from the crowd is easier and more cost-effective. This should include building a community and leveraging its power long-term — not just during a campaign.”

Post the event, Barry James added energy to this thread, noting: “The energy revolution is a whole new canvas with huge potential to coevolve with crowdfunding here in the UK, and, I suspect, elsewhere. Something worth some focus?”

The opportunity is massive. Climate infrastructure, renewable energy, community ownership models — these are exactly the kinds of projects where crowdfunding’s original promise (democratizing access, engaging citizens, distributing benefits) should thrive.

But platforms are structured for the wrong game.

Technology as Enabler, Not Solution

The platform leaders program at ICAFR featured presentations and discussions on AI, tokenization, and infrastructure — presented by Neera Patel (DacxiChain on AI governance), Daniel Wernicke (NYALA on tokenization and co-listing), Tim J. Sauer (secupay on payment infrastructure), and others.

The technology discussions were notably practical. Not “AI will revolutionize everything” but “here’s how AI creates new governance challenges that platforms aren’t ready for.” Not “tokenization solves liquidity” but “here’s how tokenized securities enable cross-platform distribution while maintaining investor data protection.”

Andy Field’s summary captured the room’s consensus: “Technology, including AI, tokenization, and infrastructure, is beginning to provide real solutions, but adoption will rely on practical implementation rather than theory.”

Translation: The tools exist. The regulatory frameworks are emerging. The missing piece is coordination between platforms willing to build shared infrastructure rather than proprietary moats.

Daniel Wernicke’s presentation on NYALA’s Co-Listing Network illustrated this perfectly. Tokenization doesn’t automatically solve cross-border distribution. But when platforms agree on shared standards, blockchain-based registries can enable “shared fees, unified reporting, and zero investor data sharing between platforms.”

The technology enables the coordination. But platforms have to choose coordination first.

What Comes Next?

If the first 20 years were about proving crowdfunding works, the next 20 years are about deciding what kind of market to build around it.

Several potential pathways emerged from ICAFR discussions:

Path 1: Professionalization and Integration Continue current trajectory. Better integration with traditional finance. Institutional investors. Qualified investor focus. Stricter compliance. Higher barriers to entry.

This path delivers scale and stability. It also risks losing crowdfunding’s original promise entirely.

Path 2: Community-Driven Finance Fundamentally rethink platform models. Optimize for ongoing community relationships, not transaction efficiency. Finance new types of organizations (cooperatives, community-owned, steward-owned). Build infrastructure for shared ownership and governance, not just capital allocation.

This path is riskier and requires rebuilding core assumptions. It also reconnects with why crowdfunding felt revolutionary in the first place.

Path 3: Hybrid Infrastructure Provide professional, compliant infrastructure that enables both paths. Tokenization and digital share management that supports both VC-style equity rounds AND community ownership models. AI governance that works for both institutional deals AND citizen participation projects.

The Question That Matters

GECA Steering Committee member Florence de Maupeou, also reflecting during the panel discussion, captured the choice facing the industry:

“The sector has undergone deep transformation: increasing institutionalization, with the arrival of qualified investors, legal entities, financial advisors, and banking networks… strong professionalization, driven in particular by demanding regulatory frameworks.”

That’s path one. It’s happening. The question is whether it’s the only path.

Ronald Kleverlaan’s challenge stands: “To finance innovation in society, we first need to innovate finance.”

The real innovation isn’t in technology. It’s in who we finance and how communities are involved. That was the original promise and added value of crowdfunding. And that’s exactly where the next phase should emerge — if platforms choose to build it.

What ICAFR Proved

The most valuable outcome of ICAFR was getting the right people in the same room having honest conversations about hard questions.

As Andy Field noted: “This was a great reminder that there is so much value in simply getting the right people in the room and having the right conversations.”

Rotem Shneor and Marco Luzi organized a space where academics and practitioners could actually collaborate — not present past each other, but build shared understanding of the challenges ahead.

That collaborative spirit needs to extend beyond conferences.

Platforms competing for deals while duplicating infrastructure isn’t sustainable. Regulators working in isolation while platforms struggle with jurisdictional fragmentation isn’t scalable. Technology providers building proprietary solutions while standards remain fragmented isn’t efficient.

The industry has a choice: Keep digitizing traditional finance models with slightly better user interfaces, or actually transform finance by building infrastructure for new kinds of organizations, new kinds of ownership, and new kinds of community participation.

The technology exists. The regulatory frameworks are emerging. The question is whether platforms will coordinate to build it — or keep competing to replicate what already exists.

ICAFR Málaga didn’t answer that question but it named it clearly enough that the industry can no longer pretend it doesn’t exist.

The next 20 years won’t look like the last 20 years unless we choose to make them that way.

Looking Ahead

ICAFR 2027 will convene in Montpellier, France. By then, we’ll know whether the industry took Ronald Kleverlaan’s challenge seriously — or whether we’re still digitizing traditional finance and calling it transformation.

The platforms, technology providers, and ecosystem participants at ICAFR Málaga have the tools, the expertise, and increasingly the regulatory frameworks to build something genuinely different.

Whether they choose to is the only question that matters.

About ICAFR: The International Conference for Alternative Finance Research brings together academics, platforms, regulators, and technology providers annually to advance crowdfunding research and practice. Organized by the European Centre for Alternative Finance at Utrecht University and the University of Agder (UiA), ICAFR 2026 was hosted by Universidad de Málaga, April 8–10.

About GECA: The Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance is a neutral, industry-led network fostering dialogue, alignment, and practical pathways for cross-border collaboration in equity crowdfunding. Learn more at https://thegeca.org

In 2012–13, while most policymakers still viewed crowdfunding as an experimental curiosity, Barry James was doing something radical: tracking every campaign, building the data infrastructure to prove crowdfunding worked, and simultaneously architecting the regulatory change needed to let it flourish.

A decade later, that dual approach — rigorous data intelligence combined with regulatory innovation — has transformed how governments worldwide approach fintech regulation.

Now, GECA welcomes Barry as Strategic Advisor, that same systems-level thinking comes to the challenge of building borderless crowdfunding.

When Data Meets Disruption

Barry didn’t just write about crowdfunding’s potential. He created The Crowd Data Center, tracking over 900,000 campaigns across more than a decade — the world’s largest crowdfunding dataset. This wasn’t academic curiosity. It was infrastructure.

“We needed evidence, not anecdotes,” explains Barry, “Regulators don’t move on enthusiasm. They move on data that demonstrates market function, investor behaviour, and risk profiles. The Crowd Data Center became the analytical foundation that helped legitimize crowdfunding as a mainstream funding channel — first in the UK, then globally.”

That data revealed patterns nobody else could see. His “State of the Crowdfunding Nation” reports, published quarterly since 2014, didn’t just track volume. They exposed the emergence of what Barry termed the “eFunding Escalator” — a new capital formation pathway where crowdfunding served as validation for traditional finance to follow.

Yet more groundbreaking was “Women Unbound,” research conducted with PwC analyzing 450,000+ campaigns. The findings challenged conventional wisdom: women-led crowdfunding campaigns reached their targets more often than men-led campaigns — a stark contrast to the expectations there have been in traditional entrepreneurship where women receive barely two percent of venture funding.

“The data told us something profound about access and bias,” Barry notes. “Crowdfunding wasn’t just democratizing capital access. It was revealing how traditional gatekeepers had systematically failed entire demographics. That evidence became impossible for policymakers to ignore.”

The Regulatory Architect

But data alone doesn’t change systems. In August 2012, Barry published a proposal in Real Business that would reshape UK financial regulation: the Financial Conduct Authority (then FSA) should create an “Innovation Unit” specifically designed to enable fintech innovation while maintaining investor protection.

The idea was revolutionary. Financial regulators traditionally approached innovation with caution, if not outright resistance — ‘Prevention Mindset’. Barry’s proposal flipped the model: regulation should also support innovation, without compromising protections.

Barry explained at the time. “We had regulatory frameworks designed for 20th-century financial institutions being applied to 21st-century technology platforms. The mismatch was strangling innovation that could benefit millions of underserved businesses and investors.”

He didn’t just propose the concept. He campaigned for it. Through the Westminster Crowdfunding Forum he co-founded and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Crowdfunding and Non-Bank Finance, Barry worked directly with legislators to make the case.

In 2014, the FCA Innovation Unit (“Hub”) launched, beginning the transforming the UK’s regulatory culture. The impact rippled globally. Today, more than 95 regulators have replicated the model, specifically designed to enable fintech while protecting ecosystem participants. The innovation has since spread across 18 fields from aerospace and AI to nuclear.

“Barry’s work on the FCA Innovation Unit represents exactly the kind of systems thinking we need for global crowdfunding harmonization,” said Andy Field, GECA Steering Committee Executive Lead. “He didn’t just advocate for less regulation or more innovation. He architected a framework that enabled innovation, serving rather than endangering protections — and proved it could work at national scale. Creating a model that is now referenced worldwide.”

From Westminster to Global Standards

Barry’s influence extends beyond single initiatives. As Co-Chair of the Westminster Forum on Crowdfunding and Non-Bank Finance, he co-created the institutional space where regulators, platforms, entrepreneurs, and policymakers could engage in evidence-based dialogue.

These weren’t talking shops. They were working sessions that shaped policy at the highest levels. When the UK government needed to understand crowdfunding’s role in SME finance, they looked to Barry’s data. When the European Commission sought insights on alternative finance regulation, Barry’s research informed their approach.

His book, “New Routes to Funding — The Handbook of Modern Funding,” became required reading for business advisors and entrepreneurs navigating the new funding landscape. Industry leaders called it a “page turner” and “gamechanger” — unusual praise for a book about capital formation mechanics.

“Barry has this extraordinary ability to grasp complicated systems and translate them for ordinary people with metaphors that border on the lyrical,” noted Dr. Julie Gregory, a long-time collaborator. “Always visionary, always reaching for the future.”

Beyond Crowdfunding: Blockchain, AI, and Digital Money

Barry’s expertise doesn’t stop at crowdfunding. As Founding Chair of the British Blockchain and Frontier Technologies Association, and a founding columnist for City AM’s CryptoInsider, and The Fintech Times, he’s tracked the evolution of blockchain, tokenization, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) with the same data-driven rigour he brought to crowdfunding.

His Remaking Money project explores how CBDCs will transform national currencies — changes he describes as potentially as significant as the internet itself. His Humane Economics work challenges the financialized thinking that he argues damages both society and planetary ecology. He has said:

“Eighty-six percent of central banks globally are now working on digital currencies,” Barry observed. “This will touch everyone. At every stage there will be opportunities and pitfalls. We need the same kind of evidence-based, systems-level thinking we applied to crowdfunding regulation — but at an even larger scale.”

This polymathic approach — spanning crowdfunding data, regulatory architecture, blockchain technology, AI implications, and monetary systems — represents exactly the cross-disciplinary thinking required for global coordination.

“What we need in global crowdfunding harmonization isn’t expertise in just one domain,” Field emphasized. “We need people who understand how technology, regulation, data, and institutional behavior interact across complex systems. Barry’s four decades navigating those intersections — in the NHS with health tech, in financial services with fintech, in policy with regulatory innovation — gives him unique translation capability between worlds that typically don’t speak the same language.”

The GECA Mission

Barry’s appointment comes as GECA advances from dialogue to infrastructure-building. The organization’s mission — creating transparent, credible, borderless equity crowdfunding markets — requires exactly the combination Barry brings: data intelligence that builds the evidence base, regulatory expertise that enables practical frameworks, and systems thinking that connects fragmented pieces into coherent wholes.

“I’m excited to join GECA at this pivotal moment,” Barry said. “We’re at an inflection point with huge challenges and even greater potential. Equity crowdfunding could remain trapped in fragmented national silos — or could fulfil its potential as global infrastructure. If we have the drive and ambition to build the standards, data interoperability, and trust architecture to make this a reality.”

GECA’s first priorities include advancing work on disclosure standards, platform interoperability, and evidence-based advocacy with regulators. The Crowd Data Center’s decade-plus dataset provides GECA with unmatched analytical depth on campaign performance, investor behaviour, and market dynamics across jurisdictions — insights that inform both standards development and regulatory dialogue.

“Barry doesn’t just bring data or regulatory expertise in isolation,” Field noted. “He brings the methodology for using data to drive regulatory evolution — the same approach that created the FCA Innovation Unit. That’s transformative for GECA. We’re not just advocating for better rules. We’re building the evidence base that helps regulators worldwide understand what works.”

Looking Ahead

Barry’s career trajectory reveals a consistent pattern: identify emerging technology or market structure, build the data infrastructure to understand it rigorously, create the institutional spaces for stakeholder dialogue, and architect the frameworks that enable innovation while protecting participants.

He did it in the NHS during the 1990s, pioneering electronic health information transfer with what became nationally known as the “Sheffield Project.” He did it in fintech with the FCA Innovation Unit. He did it in crowdfunding with The Crowd Data Center and Westminster Forums.

Now he’s applying that same methodology to GECA’s mission of borderless crowdfunding markets.

“The technology for cross-border crowdfunding exists,” Field observed. “The demand exists — investors already invest internationally, and platforms already scale across borders. What’s missing is the coordinated infrastructure: common disclosure standards, interoperable data schemas, regulatory frameworks that recognize each other’s gatekeeping. That’s not a technology problem. It’s a coordination problem. And coordination problems require the kind of multi-stakeholder, evidence-based, systems-level work that GECA champions.”

With Barry’s appointment, GECA gains not just UK representation but four decades of proven infrastructure-building expertise — the data intelligence, regulatory architecture capability, and institutional relationships needed to turn fragmentation into coordination.

“We’re building the rails for global crowdfunding,” Field concluded. “Barry’s been building rails his entire career — in health tech, in fintech, in regulatory innovation. He knows what it takes to turn aspiration into infrastructure. Welcome to the team, Barry. Let’s build what comes next.”

About Barry James

Barry James is a polymathic analyst, strategist, and transition architect with over 40 years of pioneering expertise in technology, finance, and social innovation, with impact across ~100 nations. As Founder and CEO of The Crowd Data Center, he created one of the world’s leading crowdfunding data resources, tracking 900,000+ campaigns over more than a decade.

Barry conceived and successfully advocated for the creation of the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s Innovation Unit (2012–2014), transforming regulatory culture to enable fintech innovation — a model since replicated in approximately 100 jurisdictions globally. As author of “New Routes to Funding — The Handbook of Modern Funding” and founding Co-Chair of the Westminster Forum on Crowdfunding and Non-Bank Finance, he has shaped policy dialogue at the highest levels.

His “State of the Crowdfunding Nation” reports and groundbreaking “Women Unbound” research with PwC provide evidence-based insights demonstrating how crowdfunding unlocks entrepreneurial potential. With deep expertise spanning equity crowdfunding, blockchain, AI, and central bank digital currencies, Barry brings systems thinking and institutional relationships essential to GECA’s mission of harmonized global crowdfunding standards.

About GECA

The Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance (GECA) is a neutral, industry-led network bringing together equity crowdfunding platforms, national associations, regulators, policymakers, and technology providers to build transparent, credible, borderless equity crowdfunding markets.

GECA’s mission is to foster dialogue, alignment, and practical pathways for cross-border collaboration — addressing regulatory fragmentation, advancing interoperable infrastructure, and creating the standards and trust architecture that enable equity crowdfunding to fulfill its global potential.

Learn more: https://thegeca.org
Join GECA: https://thegeca.org/join

Media Contact:
Andy Field
GECA Steering Committee Executive Lead
info@thegeca.org

The Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance (GECA) today announced the appointment of Jill Storey as Strategic Advisor for Australia to its Steering Committee, marking a significant expansion of the organization’s Asia-Pacific expertise and regulatory insight.

Jill brings over 25 years of global financial expertise spanning four continents, pioneering crowdfunding experience from the sector’s earliest days, and proven impact investing leadership at the intersection of finance, innovation, and climate solutions.

From Big 4 Partnership to Crowdfunding Pioneer

Jill’s career foundation was built through partnerships at three of the world’s most prestigious professional services firms — Andersen, KPMG, and Deloitte — across the UK, Europe, Hong Kong, and Australia. In these roles, she advised global financial institutions and multinationals in energy and resources sectors on complex cross-border tax strategy, risk management, and governance issues for global workforces.

“The expertise required to navigate multi-jurisdictional regulatory frameworks, manage cross-border compliance, and advise institutions on strategic risk is exactly what GECA needs as we work toward harmonized global crowdfunding standards,” said Andy Field, GECA Steering Committee Executive Lead. “Jill doesn’t just understand regulatory complexity theoretically — she’s lived it at the highest institutional level across four continents and multiple regulatory regimes.”

But what sets Jill apart is her rare combination of institutional rigor and entrepreneurial agility. In 2012, following the London Olympics, she recognized crowdfunding’s potential to democratize access to finance and founded a donation-based crowdfunding platform in the UK called Inspire a Star, designed to help children and young people realize their sporting dreams.

This wasn’t a side project — it was a fundamental shift from advising institutions to building infrastructure that served underrepresented communities directly.

Building Australia’s Equity Crowdfunding Framework

After relocating to Australia, Jill acquired and developed ReadyFundGo, an Australian reward-based crowdfunding platform focused on social entrepreneurs, innovators, and startups. Her hands-on platform experience provided invaluable insight into what makes crowdfunding work in practice — not just in regulatory theory.

Building on this experience, Jill worked closely with several Australian crowdfunding platforms during a critical period: the early implementation of Australia’s regulated equity crowdfunding framework. She supported two Australian platforms in obtaining their ASIC crowd-sourced equity funding licenses — navigating one of the world’s most progressive regulatory environments for retail equity investment.

Her work across donation, reward, and equity-based crowdfunding models provides a comprehensive perspective on alternative finance evolution that few practitioners can match.

Governance, Policy Leadership, and Industry Development

Since 2017, Jill has served as Non-Executive Board Member of the Crowdfunding Institute of Australia, contributing to industry development and dialogue around crowdfunding and emerging forms of digital finance. Her governance experience spans corporate organizations, not-for-profits, and early-stage ventures — bringing practical insight into building sustainable, well-governed crowdfunding platforms and markets.

“GECA isn’t just about platforms — it’s about building trustworthy, well-governed ecosystems that regulators, investors, and issuers can rely on,” Field emphasized. “Jill’s board-level governance experience across multiple organizational types gives her the systems-level perspective we need to help platforms professionalize while maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit that makes crowdfunding powerful.”

Impact Investing and Climate Finance Leadership

Currently serving as Ocean CO2 Removal Advisor to the World Ocean Council, Jill exemplifies the intersection of finance, innovation, and impact investing. She works across the global marine carbon dioxide removal (CDR) ecosystem on commercialization, policy alignment, and measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) integrity — advancing high-integrity, ocean-based carbon removal solutions while maintaining rigorous standards for commercialization and governance.

Her focus on ocean-based climate solutions addresses one of the most critical challenges facing global climate strategy. As equity crowdfunding increasingly channels capital toward sustainable innovation, climate tech, and impact ventures, Jill’s expertise in structuring high-integrity impact markets becomes directly relevant.

Jill’s credentials reflect her commitment to combining theoretical rigor with practical application. She holds an MBA, a Master’s in Environmental Science, and is both a Chartered Accountant and Chartered Taxation Specialist.

Why This Appointment Matters for GECA

Jill’s unique combination positions her perfectly to advance GECA’s mission of creating transparent, credible, borderless equity crowdfunding markets. Her institutional finance expertise — twenty-five years advising global institutions across four continents — provides deep understanding of how institutions evaluate regulatory complexity. Her hands-on experience supporting platforms through ASIC licensing offers practical insight into operationalizing progressive regulation. Her multi-model crowdfunding experience and climate finance leadership demonstrate ability to structure high-integrity markets that balance innovation with credibility.

“I’m honored to join GECA’s Steering Committee at such a pivotal moment for global crowdfunding,” Jill said. “Throughout my career — from advising multinational institutions on cross-border governance to founding platforms that help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life — I’ve seen firsthand how fragmentation creates friction and how coordination unlocks potential. Equity crowdfunding has proven it can democratize access to capital, support underrepresented founders, and channel investment toward innovation that matters. But for it to reach its full potential globally, we need the kind of regulatory clarity, platform interoperability, and trust infrastructure that GECA is building.”

Australia’s equity crowdfunding framework, regulated by ASIC, represents one of the more progressive approaches globally. The crowd-sourced equity funding (CSEF) regime allows eligible companies to raise up to AUD 5 million per year from retail and wholesale investors through licensed intermediaries. Jill’s direct experience helping platforms navigate ASIC licensing during this framework’s early implementation provides GECA with valuable insights into what works when translating regulatory intent into operational reality.

“Jill’s appointment represents exactly the kind of expertise GECA needs as we move from dialogue to infrastructure-building,” Field noted. “She brings the rare combination of Big 4 institutional rigor and hands-on crowdfunding platform experience. Her work supporting Australian platforms through ASIC equity crowdfunding licensing is particularly valuable -Australia’s framework is one of the most progressive globally, and Jill’s direct experience gives her insight into what works, what doesn’t, and how to translate regulatory intent into platform practice.”

Looking Ahead

Jill’s appointment comes at a pivotal time for GECA and the global equity crowdfunding ecosystem. As regulatory frameworks mature, technology enablers like tokenization and AI emerge, and cross-border activity increases, the need for coordinated standards, interoperable infrastructure, and trust architecture becomes more urgent.

GECA’s work focuses on creating practical pathways for cross-border collaboration by addressing regulatory fragmentation, advancing interoperable platforms and data standards, and building the evidence base that helps regulators, platforms, and policymakers make informed decisions.

Jill’s appointment strengthens GECA’s ability to deliver on this mission by bringing direct regulatory licensing experience, multi-stakeholder governance expertise, impact investing rigor, entrepreneurial insight, and climate finance leadership that connects crowdfunding to broader sustainable finance trends.

Australia’s representation on GECA’s Steering Committee strengthens the organization’s Asia-Pacific presence at a critical time, enabling cross-jurisdictional learning from one of the world’s most advanced equity crowdfunding regulatory frameworks.

About Jill Storey

Jill Storey is a finance and crowdfunding expert with over 25 years of global experience spanning institutional finance, entrepreneurship, governance, and impact investing. A former Partner with Andersen, KPMG, and Deloitte across the UK, Europe, Hong Kong, and Australia, she advised global financial institutions and multinationals on complex cross-border strategy, risk management, and governance.

An early crowdfunding pioneer, Jill founded a donation-based platform in the UK in 2012 and later owned and developed an Australian reward-based platform. She has worked closely with crowdfunding platforms across donation, reward, and equity models, including supporting two Australian platforms in obtaining ASIC crowd-sourced equity funding licenses.

Since 2017, Jill has served as Non-Executive Board Member of the Crowdfunding Institute of Australia. Currently Ocean CO2 Removal Advisor to the World Ocean Council, she advances high-integrity ocean-based carbon removal and climate markets. Jill holds an MBA, Master’s in Environmental Science, and is a Chartered Accountant and Chartered Taxation Specialist.

About GECA

The Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance (GECA) is a neutral, industry-led network bringing together equity crowdfunding platforms, national associations, regulators, policymakers, and technology providers to build transparent, credible, borderless equity crowdfunding markets.

GECA’s mission is to foster dialogue, alignment, and practical pathways for cross-border collaboration — addressing regulatory fragmentation, advancing interoperable infrastructure, and creating the standards and trust architecture that enable equity crowdfunding to fulfill its global potential.

Learn more: https://thegeca.org
Join GECA: https://thegeca.org/join

Equity crowdfunding is already crossing borders. The rules aren’t keeping up — and a new alliance of industry veterans thinks that has to change.

From 49 countries on Zoom to one shared problem

When the Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance (GECA) convened a joint webinar with Crowdfund Insider and the European Digital Finance Association (EDFA), 49 countries dialed in to talk about a single, stubborn challenge: how to turn today’s patchwork of national rules into a genuinely connected global ecosystem for crowdfunding.

As GECA steering committee lead Andy Field put it, crowdfunding is already global in practice — investors and platforms are operating across borders every day — but still fragmented in regulation, infrastructure and coordination.

The consequences are concrete:

• Founders who want to raise across borders face multiple regulatory systems, overlapping compliance regimes and incompatible technology standards.
• Investors struggle to access deals outside their home market.
• Platforms duplicate costs, and offers that should be global remain stubbornly local — just when capital is urgently needed for SMEs, climate projects, infrastructure and innovation.

GECA’s answer is deliberately modest and ambitious at the same time: not a lobbying machine for one preferred regime, but a neutral, industry‑led network that brings together platforms, investors, founders, industry associations, regulators, policymakers and tech providers to create practical pathways for cross‑border collaboration.

This webinar -anchored by moderator Andrew Dix of Crowdfund Insider with contributions from US securities lawyer Robin Sosnow, German policy veteran Karsten Wenzlaff, UK pioneer Bruce Davis, and a second‑half line‑up featuring Konstantin Boyko, Neera Patel, Sherwood “Woodie” Neiss and Benoit Collas — was a high‑level tour of where those pathways might emerge.

The US: Jobs Act 2.0 and a market “almost there”

To understand where online capital formation is going, the panelists began by looking back. In the United States, Robin Sosnow traced the evolution from the 2012 JOBS Act to today’s mix of exemptions that underpin investment crowdfunding.

Regulation D was first to change, allowing general solicitation in 2013 and effectively legitimizing online private placements to accredited investors. Regulation A followed in 2015, re‑emerging as “Reg A+” with the ability to raise from retail investors under a two‑tier system that now allows up to 75 million dollars under Tier 2 — a structure increasingly attractive to later‑stage private companies eyeing alternatives to a traditional IPO.

Then came Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF) in 2016, which legalized retail investment crowdfunding but initially capped offerings at 1 million dollars per 12‑month period. The cost of legal, portal and accounting work made that cap hard to justify, and early adoption was modest.

The real inflection point arrived with 2021 rule changes:

• The Reg CF limit rose to 5 million dollars.
• “Testing the waters” became permissible.
• Crowdfunding vehicles (SPVs) were allowed, solving the “messy cap table” concern by pooling investors into a single LLC on the issuer’s cap table.

Since then, the various JOBS Act exemptions have started to function as a coherent capital stack for private companies, rather than disconnected experiments.

The SEC continues to refine the rules at a more granular level. Recent compliance and disclosure interpretations clarified, for example, that Reg CF investor limits for retail investors are calculated on a calendar‑year basis, even though issuer offering caps are measured on a rolling 12‑month period. On the Reg A side, the Commission has confirmed that issuers can file draft offering statements confidentially, shielding their initial disclosures and SEC comment correspondence from competitors until they choose to go public.

Legislatively, the Invest Act currently before the US Senate would raise the threshold at which very small Reg CF issuers must provide reviewed financial statements — moving it from around 100,000 dollars to 250,000 dollars, with scope to increase that to 400,000 dollars over time. That change, Robin argued, will matter for true micro‑offers, even if a deeper fix would also relax the requirement for GAAP‑based financials at the very bottom of the market.

The more controversial frontier is the accredited investor definition. The policy conversation is shifting from purely wealth‑based criteria toward some form of knowledge‑based certification — potentially unlocking a broader pool of sophisticated investors without lowering standards.

Through all of this, Dix framed a simple success condition: three stakeholders must win, or the system fails. Platforms must be profitable; issuers must raise the capital they need; investors must see a reasonable path to returns. Technology, he argued, is finally bringing that goal into view — if regulation can keep up.

Europe: ECSPR’s promise — and a 5 vs 12 million problem

On the other side of the Atlantic, Europe has spent the past decade wrestling with its own fragmentation. When early drafts of the European Crowdfunding Service Providers Regulation (ECSPR) were written ten years ago, some EU member states did not even permit online securities offerings. Others had bespoke frameworks, but cross‑border operations remained painfully complex.

ECSPR was designed to change that by harmonizing how platforms are licensed, what they may offer, and how they must report. Under the framework:

• Platforms can intermediate transferable securities (mainly shares) and loans.
• Issuers can raise up to 5 million euros per year across all platforms, EU‑wide.
• Instead of hard investor caps, platforms must segment investors as “sophisticated” or “non‑sophisticated” and apply knowledge and appropriateness tests for the latter — an approach borrowed in spirit from the UK.
• Issuers must provide a six‑page Key Investment Information Sheet (KIIS), the EU’s surprisingly user‑friendly “KIIS” document, which serves as a standardized disclosure across member states.

In theory, ECSPR created a unified passport for platforms and issuers. In practice, Karsten Wenzlaff noted, fragmentation lingers in subtler ways:

• National regulators interpret and apply the rules differently.
• Investors still display a strong “home bias” -Spanish investors prefer Spanish platforms and SMEs, even though they could easily back Slovak or German deals.

The most striking anomaly is the fundraising cap. Under separate prospectus rules, a company can raise up to 12 million euros from the public on its own site without a full prospectus, as long as it stays within the EU Listing Act thresholds and structures the offer correctly. The moment it uses a regulated crowdfunding platform, however, it is constrained to 5 million euros in aggregate across all platforms.

That inversion — platforms being more constrained than direct offerings — cuts against the original policy intent of using regulated platforms to channel capital to SMEs and scale‑ups. It also feels increasingly out of step with the capital requirements of modern sectors, from AI to deep tech.

An ECSPR working group led by platforms and associations has already published an 80‑page evaluation report, and the European Commission is formally required under Article 45 of ECSPR to review the regime this year. Wenzlaff and his peers are pushing to align the crowdfunding cap with the 12‑million‑euro threshold used elsewhere in EU capital markets legislation, with an expectation that inflation and market development may eventually push that number higher.

Secondary markets are another fault line. Today, ECSPR platforms can host bulletin boards, but cannot operate true order‑matching marketplaces. That leaves issuers and investors with limited liquidity and constrains the ability of crowdfunding to feed into a broader private‑markets stack.

Tokenization could, in theory, help. Wenzlaff sees three immediate use cases:

• Dynamically splitting and routing fees when multiple platforms syndicate a deal, recognizing the additional work done by the “originating” platform.
• Enabling compliance checks and investment limits to be enforced on‑chain, without platforms having to share raw investor data with competitors.
• Providing a decentralized, tamper‑resistant channel for post‑investment reporting, ensuring that all investors receive the same information at the same time, regardless of which platform they used.

But as Benoit Collas of impact‑focused EU platform Enerfip emphasized, none of this is painless. Even within ECSPR, he recounted, a recent cross‑border “deal sharing” arrangement between his platform and a neighbor depended on quirks in the other platform’s national license that allowed them to invest via a specific vehicle; when they tried to replicate that structure elsewhere, regulators simply said no.

Compliance, in other words, is both bridge and wall: essential for trust and investor protection, but frequently the reason why a promising model works once and then stops.

The UK: from crowdfunding pioneer to private‑markets testbed

If the US is iterating through Congress and SEC guidance, and the EU is rationalizing 27 national regimes, the UK sits in an interesting third position: a mature crowdfunding market now being wired into a broader private‑capital strategy.

Bruce Davis — co‑founder of Abundance Investment and long‑time head of the UK Crowdfunding Association — reminded the audience that the UK’s regulatory framework has always existed on top of its own securities and markets legislation, and that differences at that base layer now translate into divergent crowdfunding models.

On the equity and bond side, platforms are regulated to “arrange deals” and promote them to the public, with explicit responsibilities for segmenting customers and assessing whether an investment is appropriate. Peer‑to‑peer loans sit under a separate regime, where it is the activity rather than the instrument that is regulated, reflecting the fact that P2P emerged before regulation caught up.

Over the last seven years, Davis argued, the UK has shifted away from principles‑based regulation toward product regulation. That shift means supervisors now spend much of their time debating business models with platforms — defining the shape of the product, not just the standards it must meet.

The upside is that crowdfunding is now seen as part of a broader push to “mobilize private capital,” not an oddity on the fringe. New rules for Public Offer Platforms (POPs) and Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange Systems (Pisces) effectively create a continuum:

• Traditional crowdfunding rules apply up to 5 million pounds.
• Above that, POPs enable unlimited offers to the public in the private markets, blurring the line between private and public issuance.
• Pisces provides a framework for intermittent secondary transactions in private company shares — initially conceived as a solution for VC portfolio liquidity, but now opening cautiously to retail.

This architecture makes it easier to imagine a company raising growth capital from the crowd and then offering episodic liquidity events without a full listing, all within one coherent regulatory perimeter.

Secondary markets remain constrained, however. Like their EU counterparts, UK platforms typically operate bulletin boards rather than fully regulated multilateral trading facilities (MTFs). The concern, Davis said, is that importing the full machinery of listed‑market regulation into the crowdfunding context would be prohibitively expensive and inappropriate for smaller tickets.

A more immediate brake on growth is marketing friction. After successive rounds of rule‑tightening, UK platforms now face complex appropriateness assessments and near‑perfect pass‑rate expectations for retail investors, driving up acquisition costs and pushing many players to cut back on marketing. The FCA has launched a discussion paper to review whether those frictions have overshot, opening the door to potential recalibration.

On tokenization, the UK has taken a conservative line: if you tokenize an investment asset, you are still carrying on regulated activity; tokenization does not grant you a different regime. That makes tokenization a technology upgrade rather than a regulatory arbitrage — its value must come from efficiency and better user experience, not lighter rules.

Where the UK really stands out is in tax. The Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Seed EIS (SEIS) provide generous income‑tax relief on investments into qualifying high‑risk companies (around 30 percent for EIS and 50 percent for SEIS), plus loss relief in certain cases. The Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA) allows investors to hold peer‑to‑peer loans and other qualifying instruments in a tax‑advantaged wrapper, with up to 20,000 pounds in new contributions each year and no tax on income or gains within the envelope.

Davis called these schemes “the one thing we got right” and vowed that the industry would “defend IFISA till we die,” arguing that they have been a key driver of capital into early‑stage and growth companies and a necessary leveler against the attractions of listed markets and pensions.

Karsten Wenzlaff, for his part, sees EIS/SEIS as a model Europe should take seriously — not just as a way to boost crowdfunding volumes, but as a bridge that turns retail investors into tomorrow’s angel investors. The political challenge is that taxation remains a national competence within the EU, and Brussels has historically preferred EU‑wide guarantee schemes over pan‑European tax incentives. That may be shifting as member states hunt for ways to mobilize private capital for energy transition, defense and health, but any UK‑style regime would require both technical and political alignment.

Tokenization, AI and shared infrastructure: tools, not silver bullets

If the first half of the webinar mapped the regulatory terrain, the second half turned to tools: tokenization, AI and shared infrastructure.

Andrew Dix and Sherwood “Woodie” Neiss — author of Investomers and policy expert, were clear that tokenization is no longer hypothetical. US platforms like Republic have already used tokenized securities; firms like Securitize began as enablers and have evolved into marketplaces, and institutions such as Figure have built tokenization stacks from the institutional side. The New York Stock Exchange has announced a tokenized securities exchange, signaling that mainstream market infrastructure is moving in this direction as well.

For Dix, the promise is straightforward: remove intrinsic frictions, reduce costs, improve security, portability and compliance, and enable new categories of assets to reach investors. In today’s analog private markets, humans push paper through fragmented systems. Tokenization and digital market infrastructure could automate large parts of that process, especially when combined with AI.

Yet, as platform builder Konstantin Boyko stressed, technology is the easy part. The harder problems begin when you connect code to real‑world money flows, KYC, payment providers, and multiple jurisdictions. Picking a single payment provider is hard enough in one country; building a stack that gracefully spans regions is far harder.

AI, he argued, could dramatically reduce the burden of drafting and standardizing disclosure documents such as ECSPR’s Key Investment Information Sheet, where lawyers today reinvent the wheel in their own style. That view was echoed across the panel: AI can sit in the background, generating structured, regulator‑aligned templates and freeing human experts to focus on judgment rather than formatting.

Neiss sees an even broader role. The current US disclosure system is “written by lawyers for lawyers,” he said, and is increasingly unusable for the very retail investors it is supposed to protect. AI could help regulators and platforms converge on shorter, more intelligible, yet still compliant disclosures that meet investors where they are and accommodate cross‑border offerings.

On shared infrastructure, Dacxi Chain’s Chief Product Officer Neera Patel sketched a future in which neutral networks and common rails underpin syndicated deals across platforms and borders.

She highlighted three layers:

• Operational efficiency: Issuers launch a deal onto a network and have AI‑infused compliance engines run jurisdiction‑specific checks in parallel, drastically reducing manual legal duplication and accelerating time‑to‑market.
• Investor experience: A shared, verifiable KYC/identity layer -likely based on verifiable credentials — would allow investors to onboard once and then invest across multiple platforms with minimal friction, reducing drop‑off rates and cutting KYC costs.
• Transparency and auditability: Blockchain infrastructure provides an immutable record of allocations, payments, disputes and withdrawals, making it easier for platforms and regulators to monitor the life of a deal — especially when it is syndicated across borders.

Patel was pragmatic about the obstacles. Tax, business‑model economics (e.g., fee split mechanics between platforms), and differing local rules still need human and political negotiation. But those are precisely the topics she believes alliances like GECA should own — creating standards and norms that technology can then codify.

Secondary markets and the search for real liquidity

If there was one theme that united all jurisdictions, it was the sense that primary issuance is only half the story. Without functioning secondary markets, equity crowdfunding will struggle to fulfill its promise.

In the US, the problem is structural. Primary issuance under Reg CF and Reg A is governed at the federal level. Secondary trading, however, falls under state “blue sky” laws, splintering the market into 50 different regimes.

Neiss pointed to the “manual exemption” as one partial workaround: issuers who publish standardized information into a national securities manual — an “Edgar‑lite” — can qualify for exemptions in many states. But the complexity of those rules, and the lack of investor demand for smaller names, have constrained activity. Most meaningful secondary trading in the US still takes place in the Reg D space, on venues like Nasdaq Private Market, Forge and EquityZen, or among larger Reg A+ issuers where investor interest is sufficient to justify the overhead.

Dix did not mince words on the state of US blue sky law: a “Byzantine mess” sustained by state regulators’ desire to preserve their own empires. He argued for a more federalized approach to secondary trading in line with the Clarity Act’s broader effort to update market infrastructure, while acknowledging that current US proposals focus more on digital commodities than tokenized securities.

In the UK, Pisces is an early attempt to square that circle by allowing controlled, episodic liquidity events without the full weight of listing rules. Davis framed the debate in lifecycle terms: different investors want or need to exit at different points, and the system should be able to recycle capital efficiently rather than locking it up until an IPO that may never come.

In Europe, stock exchanges are among the fiercest opponents of any move that might erode their monopoly on secondary trading, and that political reality helps explain ECSPR’s conservative stance on matching engines. But Wenzlaff was blunt: if Europe is serious about financing the green and digital transitions, it will need mechanisms that allow capital from the global north to flow into renewable infrastructure projects in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia, with credible liquidity options along the way.

Here again, the idea of a shared, decentralized protocol surfaced -not to replace local rules, but to provide a common technical substrate onto which different regulatory wrappers could be mapped.

Why this matters now

The stakes behind this dense, acronym‑heavy conversation are high. For all the technical debate about thresholds, investor tests and SPVs, the through‑line was clear: the world needs more ways for ordinary and professional investors to fund the companies and projects that will shape the next decade — and those channels need to work across borders.

The building blocks are already visible:

• US exemptions that now support meaningful retail participation and are edging toward more inclusive definitions of sophistication.
• A pan‑European license that, once re‑tuned, could allow SMEs to raise up to 12 million euros in a single, cross‑border campaign.
• A UK ecosystem that has quietly invented a tax and regulatory stack for high‑risk private capital, and is now experimenting with POPs and Pisces as bridges into the listed world.
• Tokenization and AI tools that can take friction, cost and opacity out of compliance and operations, rather than adding new layers of hype.

What is missing is coordination — and that, ultimately, is where GECA, EDFA and their partners come in.

As Andy Field closed, the webinar was not intended as an endpoint, but as a starting block. The next step is bringing these conversations into the room: regulators, platforms, academics and technologists meeting face‑to‑face in Malaga this April to move from diagnosis to design.

Dix’s final message was simple and, in its own way, optimistic: the direction of travel is right, even if the pace is frustrating. Progress will depend on exactly the kind of cross‑jurisdictional, cross‑disciplinary dialogue this webinar represented — because in a world where capital, talent and technology are already global, leaving crowdfunding trapped in national silos is no longer a tenable option.

Watch the full webinar here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhvKrySbAr8

GECA: Frequently Asked Questions

What is GECA? The Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance (GECA) is a neutral, industry‑led network that brings together platforms, investors, founders, industry associations, regulators, policymakers and technology providers focused on investment crowdfunding.

Why was GECA created? GECA was formed because crowdfunding is already global in practice, but fragmented in regulation, infrastructure and coordination, which slows growth and limits cross‑border capital flows.

What problem is GECA trying to solve? Today, a business that wants to raise capital across borders faces multiple regulatory systems, overlapping compliance regimes and different technology standards, while investors struggle to access opportunities outside their home market.

Is GECA a lobbying organization? No. GECA’s mission is not to promote one regulatory regime over another but to act as a neutral convening layer that fosters dialogue, alignment and practical pathways for cross‑border collaboration.

Who participates in GECA activities? Participants include crowdfunding platforms, SME and startup founders, retail and professional investors, national and regional industry bodies, regulators, policymakers and technology providers building market infrastructure.

What is GECA doing in practice, beyond webinars? GECA is publishing primary‑research‑based white papers, convening working groups with partners like EDFA, and co‑hosting in‑person events such as the April meetings in Malaga to drive regulatory and technical alignment.

How does GECA view emerging tech like tokenization and AI? GECA sees tokenization and AI as tools to reduce cost and friction in compliance, reporting and cross‑border syndication — not as regulatory shortcuts — and is encouraging shared standards and infrastructure in these areas.

How can I engage with GECA next? GECA and EDFA are inviting platforms, associations and regulators to the in‑person sessions in Malaga (8–10 April) to continue these conversations through workshops on UX, secondary markets, tokenization and collaboration with academic researchers.

Full Details https://www.crowdfunding-research.org/icafr2026

Register https://www.crowdfunding-research.org/pago

GECA Membership & Participation

Who can join GECA?

GECA welcomes equity crowdfunding platforms, national and regional crowdfunding associations, regulators and policymakers, technology providers, investor associations, researchers and academics.

How do I join GECA?

Visit https://thegeca.org/join to become a GECA member or supporter organization.

What are the benefits of joining GECA?

GECA members gain:

• Access to cross-border dialogue and coordination forums
• Participation in working groups on standards, secondary markets, disclosure templates
• Networking with platforms, regulators, and technology providers globally
• Early access to research, whitepapers, and policy recommendations
• Invitations to GECA events (webinars, workshops, conferences)
• Influence on the development of global crowdfunding infrastructure

(A research-backed trends brief)

Over the past decade, equity crowdfunding has evolved from an experimental financing model into a regulated component of modern capital markets. By 2026, the sector is increasingly characterised not by loosely organised “crowds” but by structured ecosystems combining retail investors, professional capital, and supervised platforms. This transition reflects regulatory consolidation, technological infrastructure development, and the growing integration of crowdfunding into the broader private-capital landscape.

1. From experimental niche to supervised market infrastructure

By 2026, equity crowdfunding (ECF) has moved decisively out of its experimental phase and into the regulated online capital-markets stack. The common pattern across major jurisdictions is the same: clearer operator responsibilities, harmonised rules for cross-border activity, and a sharper distinction between supervised platforms and unregulated campaign websites.

In the European Union, the European Crowdfunding Service Providers Regulation (ECSPR, Regulation (EU) 2020/1503) has created a passport regime under which platforms must be authorised as Crowdfunding Service Providers (CSPs) and may then operate across participating member states under a single rulebook. According to ESMA’s 2024 and 2025 Crowdfunding Market Reports, the EU market now represents low-single-digit billions of euros in annual volume, with a growing share of cross-border activity; equity and equity-like instruments account for a meaningful portion, and retail investors represent the vast majority of participants.[ESMA 2024; ESMA 2025]

In the United States, Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF) has stabilised into a predictable retail-access channel: issuers may raise up to 5 million USD in a 12-month period, provided they use a registered funding portal or broker-dealer and comply with Form C disclosure, ongoing reporting, investor-limit, and books-and-records requirements. SEC data and independent industry analyses indicate that, since the 2021 limit increase, median and upper-quartile raise sizes have trended upward, with more campaigns now falling in the 1–5 million USD band — evidence of deal-size maturation rather than a pure micro-raise phenomenon.[SEC Reg CF; KingsCrowd 2025]

In the United Kingdom, post-Brexit reform of the prospectus and public-offer regime has introduced a new Public Offer Platform (POP) framework, with rules taking effect in January 2026. FCA policy statements on the new regime explicitly anticipate that some existing crowdfunding operators will seek POP authorisation, effectively moving parts of the crowdfunding model into a more formal public-offer environment with clearer disclosure and governance expectations.[FCA 2025a; FCA 2025b]

Trend signal: ECF is being pulled into mainstream capital-markets architecture. In the EU, ECSPR consolidates a supervised, passported market; in the US, Reg CF defines a stable exempt-offering lane; in the UK, POP rules invite platforms into a modernised public-offer framework.

2. From “pure crowd” to hybrid: the rise of crowd + professional capital

A key empirical trend is the shift from purely retail-driven campaigns to hybrid capital stacks where professional or sophisticated investors act as anchors, validators, and governance partners.

Large-sample studies of technology-oriented startups and SMEs funded via crowdfunding show that early participation by professional investors -angels, funds, or platform-curated “lead investors” — has a statistically significant positive effect on campaign success, particularly in sectors with high information asymmetry such as IT and deep tech.[Shabbir et al. 2026] Professional involvement functions as a signal of quality and due diligence, reducing perceived uncertainty for retail investors and triggering informed herding behaviour.[Shabbir et al. 2026] Complementary work on sustainable-oriented ventures finds that the human capital of lead investors (experience, reputation, sector expertise) not only raises the probability of funding success but also correlates with better post-campaign performance, especially where projects are complex to evaluate.[Del Sarto et al. 2025]

Across markets, research and platform data indicate that:

• Platforms highlighting co-investment from professional investors or credible institutions see higher conversion rates.
• Campaigns with visible lead investors or platform-endorsed cornerstone commitments attract more and faster retail participation.[Estrin et al. 2022; Moysidou & Hausberg 2020]

Trend signal: In 2026, equity crowdfunding is maturing into coordinated capital: professional anchors plus structured platform screening plus retail participation. For platforms and associations, this elevates the importance of explicit signalling architecture -clear labelling of lead investors, standardised “proof layers” (traction, governance, controls), and transparent screening criteria.

3. Liquidity: from aspirational talking point to design constraint

Illiquidity has long been ECF’s structural weakness. Work on secondary markets in equity crowdfunding highlights how difficult it is to design trading venues for privately issued shares, given challenges around price discovery, information rights, transfer restrictions, and regulatory oversight.[Lukkarinen & Schwienbacher 2024] At the same time, both regulators and industry are experimenting more actively with liquidity mechanisms.

A likely staged pathway -based on current experiments and the secondary-markets literature -may involve:

• Phase 1: Controlled transfers. Limited transfer windows and bilateral transfers via platforms, with issuer consent, basic disclosure updates, and suitability checks.
• Phase 2: Venue partnerships. Selected crowdfunding-issued securities trading on regulated SME growth markets or multilateral trading facilities under specific listing and reporting standards.
• Phase 3: Interoperable rails. Wider interoperability, potentially including tokenised representations to simplify post-trade handling, but still under clear regulatory supervision.

European and national authorities acknowledge that ECSPR itself does not create secondary markets, while noting that the harmonised framework makes such experiments easier to supervise and scale.[ESMA 2024; FMA Austria 2025] Industry commentary similarly treats liquidity not as an optional “nice to have” but as a central design constraint for the next phase of ECF.[Lukkarinen & Schwienbacher 2024; GECA 2025b]

Trend signal: In 2026, the question is less whether liquidity will appear and more how it will be engineered and governed. “Liquidity with integrity” will require minimum issuer-reporting standards, fair-valuation practices, transfer controls, and clear investor-communication norms.

4. Tokenisation: from hype to cautious, infrastructure-first adoption

Tokenisation — representing securities on distributed ledgers with programmable features -has been widely promoted as a solution to private-market frictions. By 2026, the tone has become more cautious and infrastructure-focused.

IOSCO’s Final Report on the Tokenisation of Financial Assets summarises the prevailing regulatory view: tokenisation may improve operational efficiency, settlement, and automation of compliance rules, but it can also introduce or amplify risks, including unclear legal rights, new operational dependencies, and exposure to broader crypto-asset volatility.[IOSCO 2025] The report emphasises technology-neutral regulation: investor-protection and market-integrity standards apply regardless of the underlying ledger, and tokenisation must not obscure what investors actually own or who is accountable.

Surveys of institutional investors and market-infrastructure providers show growing experimentation with tokenised bonds, funds, and equities, but emphasise governance, interoperability, and regulatory clarity as prerequisites for scaled adoption.[EY 2025; Broadridge 2025] For ECF in 2026, the most credible near-term applications appear to be:

• Ledger-based or on-chain cap tables and share registries, tightly linked to legal title.
• Programmable transfer rules encoding regulatory and contractual restrictions into smart contracts.
• Automated compliance and audit trails that simplify reconciliations and supervisory review.[Mubarak & Petraite 2020; IRJMETS 2024; IJNRD 2025]

Trend signal: In 2026, tokenisation’s primary value for ECF is as back-office and compliance infrastructure, not as a retail “crowd token” story. The winning narrative is programmable governance, auditable rights, and supervised trading mechanisms, rather than speculative token trading.

5. AI, analytics, and data standardisation: trust throughput as the new moat

As ECF platforms mature, their competitive edge is shifting from attention capture (marketing reach) to trust throughput: how effectively they can screen deals, detect fraud, match investors, and generate reliable reporting.

ESMA’s most recent crowdfunding market reports explicitly discuss platforms’ current and planned use of AI and machine-learning tools in credit scoring, fraud detection, operational optimisation, and customer support, while flagging governance, bias, and explainability as emerging supervisory concerns.[ESMA 2024; ESMA 2025] In parallel, research on digital trust in platform-based ecosystems shows that digital platform trus t- confidence in the platform’s technological and governance infrastructure - is a critical mediator between firms’ innovation capabilities, crowdfunding outcomes, and technological learning.[Mubarak & Petraite 2020; Shabbir et al. 2026]

Shabbir and co-authors propose and test a capability-trust-crowdfunding pathway in which:

• Firms’ dynamic capabilities, digitalisation, and networking capabilities increase digital trust in crowdfunding platforms.
• Digital platform trust then boosts crowdfunding performance.
• Crowdfunding, in turn, enhances technological learning and innovation.[Shabbir et al. 2026]

They also emphasise that digital trust increasingly rests on transparency, immutability, and verifiability, with blockchain and advanced analytics playing a central role.[Mubarak & Petraite 2020; Shabbir et al. 2026]

Trend signal: In 2026, leading platforms increasingly:

• Enforce structured issuer disclosures and machine-readable data templates.
• Use AI/analytics for pre-screening, anomaly detection, and monitoring- with human oversight and documented model governance.
• Provide standardised KPI dashboards and reporting cadences to investors and regulators.
• Treat digital trust architecture as a first-order design problem, not an afterthought.

For regulators, AI and structured data are moving into the core of the supervisory conversation. For infrastructure providers and associations, this validates the need for shared data schemas and evidence layers that make platforms more comparable and exam-ready.

6. Cross-border ambition meets compliance realities

For more than a decade, “cross-border crowdfunding” was mainly an aspiration. By 2026, it is practically achievable in specific regions -but success depends on standards rather than slogans.

In the EU, ECSPR’s passport mechanism allows an authorised CSP in one member state to provide services across all participating states under a single authorisation, subject to notification procedures.[EC 2020; ESMA 2024] ESMA’s data and Eurocrowd’s commentary show that a growing share of campaigns now attract cross-border investors or involve cross-border issuers, and some platforms explicitly position themselves as pan-European marketplaces.[ESMA 2025; Eurocrowd 2026; Eurocrowd 2025] National regulators, such as the Austrian FMA, broadly welcome the creation of a genuinely European market but highlight challenges around language, disclosure comparability, marketing rules, and cross-border enforcement.[FMA Austria 2025]

Research on crowdfunding in emerging markets points to similar dynamics. Tajul Urus and co-authors note that as more emerging economies adopt crowdfunding frameworks, differences in regulatory maturity, enforcement, and governance create both opportunities and risks.[Tajul Urus et al. 2025] They emphasise that platform-level governance, disclosure quality, and accountability mechanisms are critical to building trust in markets where formal rules and supervisory capacity are still evolving.

Trend signal: In 2026, cross-border ECF is primarily constrained by:

• Disclosure and data interoperability (so investors and supervisors can understand and compare offers).
• Investor categorisation and suitability frameworks (to avoid regulatory arbitrage and mis-selling).
• Books-and-records standards (so authorities can rely on each other’s platforms’ evidence).

This is where neutral trust and evidence layers — systems that capture platform activity, disclosures, risk acknowledgements, orders, and funds flows in a tamper-evident, portable form — add structural value. They make it easier for platforms to rely on each other’s gatekeeping, for regulators to examine cross-border activity, and for investors to trust that foreign campaigns sit on robust compliance rails.

7. ESG, verticalisation, and the need for evidence-rich disclosures

Equity crowdfunding is also undergoing vertical specialisation: climate and clean energy, real estate, local infrastructure, and impact ventures are emerging as distinct segments with their own norms and expectations.

An fsQCA study of 88 solar crowdfunding projects in Spain and Italy finds that low perceived risk and short maturity periods are more consistently associated with funding success than high environmental impact alone; CO₂-saving metrics enhance appeal but are not sufficient by themselves.[Santos-Rojo et al. 2025] The authors conclude that retail “green” investors behave as conservative capital: they care about environmental outcomes but retain strong preferences for capital preservation and liquidity. Other work on sustainable-oriented ventures funded via ECF shows that lead investors’ expertise and credibility matter especially in ESG contexts, because projects are complex to evaluate and impact is hard to verify.[Del Sarto et al. 2025]

Trend signal: In 2026, vertical segments such as climate/energy and real estate increasingly require:

• Domain-specific disclosure templates (e.g., project economics, technical risk registers, impact metrics, verification sources).
• Clear risk-grading and maturity profiles expressed in plain language.
• Third-party validation or assurance of key technical and impact metrics.
• Evidence layers that surface the underlying assumptions, monitoring history, and governance practices, beyond marketing narratives.

Platforms that treat ESG offerings as “just another pitch” risk mis-pricing and mis-selling; those that build structured, evidence-rich disclosures and monitoring will be better positioned with both investors and regulators.

8. Macro sensitivity, consolidation, and sustainability of the model

Synthesised work on crowdfunding and macroeconomic dynamics suggests that ECF is macroeconomically sensitive rather than counter-cyclical by default. Summarising prior empirical and theoretical work, Wille argues that crowdfunding volumes respond to variables such as unemployment, interest rates, and policy uncertainty, and that in some contexts crowdfunding can act as a partial substitute for bank lending and venture capital when traditional credit tightens.[Wille 2025] At the same time, different forms of uncertainty have different effects: some measures of economic policy uncertainty can increase small-ticket, local-project participation, while heightened geopolitical risk often suppresses risk appetite.

On the micro side, supervisory reports and industry commentary point to platform consolidation and sustainability pressures. Authorisation costs, ongoing compliance obligations, competition for high-quality deal flow, and plateauing conversion rates in some saturated markets are driving weaker or under-capitalised operators out, while better-governed platforms gain share.[ESMA 2025; GECA 2025a; GECA 2025b] Post-campaign data -defaults, follow-on funding, dilution, and exits -also highlight that, like other early-stage asset classes, equity-crowdfunded portfolios are highly dispersed, with a minority of campaigns generating outsized returns and many underperforming.[Lukkarinen & Schwienbacher 2024; Tajul Urus et al. 2025; Santos-Rojo et al. 2025]

Trend signal: In 2026, policymakers increasingly see ECF as part of macro-sensitive alternative finance and focus on:

• Harmonised regimes (ECSPR, POP, Reg CF) that manage risk coherently.
• Platform-level resilience, governance, and data-quality expectations.
• Greater transparency around post-campaign performance to avoid unrealistic retail expectations.

For platforms, the implication is that long-term viability will depend less on raw campaign volumes and more on governance quality, trust architecture, and evidence-backed performance.

9. The 2026 inflection: from crowd-powered to coordinated capital

Bringing these threads together, 2026 looks like an inflection point where equity crowdfunding transitions from crowd-powered to coordinated capital:

• Regulated rails expand and harmonise (ECSPR in the EU, POP in the UK, Reg CF in the US), pulling ECF into mainstream capital-markets infrastructure.
• Hybrid capital stacks become normal, with professional anchors and platform screening shaping retail flows and post-campaign outcomes.
• Liquidity and tokenisation move from aspirational talking points to cautiously engineered mechanisms centred on governance, rights clarity, and investor protection.
• AI and structured data become core to both platform differentiation and supervisory scrutiny, with digital platform trust mediating innovation outcomes.
• Cross-border activity is enabled by passports but fundamentally constrained by disclosure comparability, investor categorisation, and books-and-records standards.
• Vertically specialised segments, especially in ESG, demand evidence-rich, verifiable disclosures and domain-specific governance.

In that environment, decisive advantages shift away from marketing and toward trust architecture:

• Shared data schemas and disclosure standards.
• Verifiable, tamper-evident evidence of platform and issuer behaviour.
• Robust digital-trust mechanisms that allow regulators, investors, and partner platforms to rely on what the rails say happened.

Equity crowdfunding is no longer just a way to mobilise the crowd; it is becoming one of the coordinated mechanisms through which private capital is raised, governed, and — eventually — traded.

References

Broadridge. 2025. Next-Gen Markets: The Rise and Reality of Tokenization. Broadridge Financial Solutions Industry Report.

Del Sarto, N., Di Pietro, F., and B. Prencipe. 2025. “Equity Crowdfunding for Sustainable-Oriented Ventures: The Role of Lead Investors’ Human Capital.” Journal of Business Venturing Insights.

ESMA (European Securities and Markets Authority). 2024. Market Report: Crowdfunding in the EU 2024.

ESMA (European Securities and Markets Authority). 2025. Market Report: Crowdfunding in the EU 2025.

Eurocrowd. 2025. “French and Italian Crowdfunding Trends: A Comparative ECSPR Monitor.” European Crowdfunding Network Report.

Eurocrowd. 2026. “ESMA Crowdfunding Market Data 2024.” Eurocrowd Market Commentary.

EY. 2025. Institutional Investor Digital Assets Survey. Ernst & Young Global Financial Services Report.

FCA (UK Financial Conduct Authority). 2025a. PS25/9 — New Rules for the Public Offers and Admissions to Trading Regime (Public Offer Platforms).

FCA (UK Financial Conduct Authority). 2025b. PS25/10 — Final Rules for Public Offer Platforms.

FMA Austria. 2025. “ESMA Report on the European Crowdfunding Market — National Commentary.” Austrian Financial Market Authority Briefing.

GECA (Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance). 2025a. Eight Pivotal Trends Reshaping Equity Crowdfunding in 2025.

GECA (Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance). 2025b. The $1 Trillion Liquidity Opportunity in Equity Crowdfunding.

IOSCO (International Organization of Securities Commissions). 2025. Tokenisation of Financial Assets: Final Report.

IRJMETS. 2024. “Crowdfunding Using Blockchain — Trust and Fraud Prevention.” International Research Journal of Modernization in Engineering Technology and Science.

IJNRD. 2025. “Trust and Fraud Prevention: A Blockchain-Based Crowdfunding Framework.” International Journal of Novel Research and Development.

KingsCrowd. 2025. Investment Crowdfunding Annual Report.

Lukkarinen, A., and A. Schwienbacher. 2024. “Secondary Markets in Equity Crowdfunding.” In Palgrave Encyclopedia of Private Equity.

Moysidou, K., and J. P. Hausberg. 2020. “In Crowdfunding We Trust: A Trust-Building Model in Crowdfunding.” Journal of Business Venturing Insights.

Mubarak, M. F., and M. Petraite. 2020. “Digital Trust in Industry 4.0 Ecosystems: The Role of Blockchain and Advanced Analytics.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

Santos-Rojo, C., J. Gallego-Nicholls, and A. Rey-Martí. 2025. “Understanding Investor Behavior in Crowdfunding for Sustainability: An fsQCA Study.” Environment, Development and Sustainability.

SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission). 2017 (updated). Regulation Crowdfunding: Small Entity Compliance Guide for Intermediaries.

Shabbir, M., Petraite, M., Mubarak, M. F., Gobakhloo, M., and A. Rasli. 2026. “More than Money: Strategic and Operational Innovation Capabilities to Promote Technological Innovation through Crowdfunding.” Financial Innovation 12(21).

Tajul Urus, S., I. S. Mohamed, Z. Abd Rasit, and M. Mohamad. 2025. “Crowdfunding in the Emerging Market: Insight into the Conceptualization and Governing Issues of Crowdfunding.” International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science 9(4): 562–571.

Wille, N. 2025. “Crowdfunding and Macroeconomic Dynamics.” SSRN Working Paper Series.

GECA — Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. What is GECA?

The Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance (GECA) is a non-profit industry alliance that brings together equity crowdfunding platforms, national associations, regulators, and technology partners to make equity crowdfunding more borderless, interoperable, and trusted worldwide.

Q2. Why does GECA matter if we already have ECSPR, Reg CF, and the UK POP regime?

Regimes such as ECSPR in the EU, Regulation Crowdfunding in the United States, and the UK’s Public Offer Platform (POP) framework define how crowdfunding operates within their respective jurisdictions.

However, these regimes do not by themselves solve fragmentation between jurisdictions, platforms, and data standards.

GECA focuses on the gaps at the edges by:

• Improving cross-border understanding between platforms and regulators
• Encouraging compatible standards across jurisdictions
• Supporting platforms that operate in multiple markets

Q3. What are GECA’s main objectives?

Based on its public statements and activities, GECA focuses on five main objectives:

• Advocacy and education — explaining the role of equity crowdfunding in modern capital markets and helping address common misconceptions.
• Policy dialogue and harmonisation — acting as a structured counterpart for regulators and policymakers working on crowdfunding, secondary markets, and related regulation.
• Ecosystem building — connecting platforms, service providers, and associations that would otherwise operate in isolation.
• Research and insight — surfacing global trends, risks, and opportunities to inform better regulation and business strategy.
• Standards and best practices — encouraging common approaches to disclosures, risk labelling, operational resilience, and cross-border practices.

Q4. How does GECA relate to the 2026 “coordinated capital” trend?

The article describes equity crowdfunding in 2026 as moving from “crowd-powered” to “coordinated capital” — where regulated rails, professional investors, and trust infrastructure increasingly shape market outcomes.

GECA’s role is to support that shift at a global level by:

• Providing a forum where platforms and associations can align on disclosure, governance, and investor-protection expectations
• Helping regulators identify where fragmentation or unintended frictions are limiting coordinated capital formation
• Highlighting successful models for hybrid investment rounds, liquidity mechanisms, and cross-border collaboration

Q5. Who can be involved in GECA?

GECA aims to support a broad membership base that may include:

• Equity crowdfunding platforms and investment platforms
• National and regional crowdfunding or fintech associations
• Professional investors and ecosystem partners such as law firms, auditors, and data providers
• Regulators and policymakers participating as observers or dialogue partners

The aim is not to create a closed club, but a representative forum for the global equity crowdfunding ecosystem.

Q6. What practical value does GECA offer to platforms?

For platforms, GECA can provide:

• Early visibility into regulatory and market trends affecting cross-border operations, secondary markets, and institutional participation
• Access to peers addressing similar challenges, such as liquidity design, disclosure standards, AI use in due diligence, and tokenisation infrastructure
• Opportunities to help shape common templates and guidelines that may later be referenced by regulators or investors
• Increased international visibility through joint research, events, and ecosystem communications

Q7. How does GECA support regulators and policymakers?

Regulators and policymakers can use GECA as a channel to:

• Understand how rules are functioning in practice across different markets
• Hear from a diverse set of platforms and associations rather than only the largest or most visible actors
• Explore the implications of emerging tools such as AI in due diligence, tokenised securities, and secondary market infrastructure in a structured dialogue

This can help inform future adjustments to ECSPR, Reg CF, the UK POP regime, and other national frameworks in a more evidence-based and internationally informed way.

Q8. How does GECA fit into the future of equity crowdfunding?

As equity crowdfunding becomes more regulated, more hybrid, and more interconnected, coordination outside formal regulation becomes increasingly important.

GECA’s role is to:

• Support alignment rather than fragmentation in disclosures, governance practices, and market expectations
• Showcase successful models from different regions and industry verticals
• Help the ecosystem move from one-off national experiments toward a more coherent global architecture for equity crowdfunding

In that sense, GECA is one of the actors helping the sector complete the transition described in the article — from isolated “crowd capital” experiments toward a coordinated and trusted layer of the private-capital market.

These Trends Don’t Build Themselves

The coordinated capital era requires coordinated action — across borders, platforms, and stakeholders. GECA is where that coordination happens.

Join us in building:

-Cross-border disclosure standards

-Liquidity infrastructure

-Trust architecture that scales globally

Join GECA today and shape the future of equity crowdfunding.

Over the past decade, private markets have expanded far beyond traditional venture capital and institutional finance. Equity crowdfunding, private credit platforms, alternative investment models, and digital infrastructure have opened participation to a broader global audience.

But growth has created a new challenge: coordination.

In the early phase of market development, innovation tends to move faster than structure. Platforms experiment, regulators observe, and participants learn through iteration. That stage helped alternative finance emerge — but it also left fragmentation behind.

Today, the industry is entering a different phase. And in this phase, industry associations are becoming increasingly important.

From Advocacy to Infrastructure

Historically, industry associations played a relatively narrow role: advocacy and representation. They acted as a collective voice when engaging regulators or promoting awareness of emerging sectors.

Private markets now require something broader.

As ecosystems mature, coordination becomes a form of infrastructure — not physical infrastructure, but institutional infrastructure. Shared standards, consistent terminology, and aligned expectations reduce friction between participants who operate across jurisdictions.

Without coordination, growth remains local. With coordination, markets become scalable.

Standard Setting Without Centralization

One of the biggest challenges in private markets is inconsistency.

Platforms often operate under different onboarding processes, disclosure expectations, and due diligence practices. Even where regulations align, operational interpretation varies widely.

Industry associations help address this gap by encouraging voluntary standards:

• common frameworks for transparency
• shared best practices for investor protection
• clearer expectations for issuers and platforms

Importantly, these standards do not replace regulation. Instead, they help markets function between regulatory boundaries — enabling cooperation without central control.

A Bridge Between Industry and Regulators

Regulators face a difficult balancing act: encouraging innovation while protecting investors.

Individual companies often struggle to communicate systemic challenges effectively. Associations provide aggregated insight — identifying patterns rather than isolated concerns.

This changes regulatory dialogue from reactive enforcement to collaborative development.

When regulators understand operational realities earlier, policy evolves more predictably. That stability benefits both platforms and investors.

Cross-Market Education

Private markets are no longer confined to single countries. Founders, investors, and platforms increasingly operate globally, but knowledge remains unevenly distributed.

Education has become one of the most valuable coordination tools.

Industry bodies help translate developments across regions:

• regulatory updates
• operational lessons
• emerging models
• market data and trends

This reduces duplication of mistakes and accelerates ecosystem learning.

Trust as a Shared Signal

Perhaps the most understated role of associations today is trust signaling.

In fragmented markets, participants constantly evaluate credibility — not just of individual deals, but of platforms, processes, and ecosystems themselves.

Association membership, participation, and collaboration act as signals that organizations are engaging within a broader professional framework.

Trust, in this sense, becomes collective rather than individual.

The Next Phase of Private Markets

Private markets are moving from experimentation toward coordination.

The next stage of growth will likely depend less on launching new platforms and more on connecting existing ones — aligning standards, improving dialogue, and enabling collaboration across borders.

Industry associations are not replacing innovation. They are helping it scale.

And as private markets mature globally, coordination may become just as important as capital itself.