Prof. Giuliano Castellano 祖里亞教授

Prof. Giuliano Castellano 祖里亞教授

Associate Professor

Director, Asian Institute of International Financial Law (AIIFL)
Director, Exchange Programme (Incoming) 

PhD (Polytechnique), PhD (Turin), Law (Bocconi), Fellow (Advance HE)

Biography

Giuliano G. Castellano is a tenured Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law and the Director of the Asian Institute of International Financial Law (AIIFL) at the University of Hong Kong. He also serves as the Director of the Law Exchange Programme for incoming students. His research and teaching focus on international and comparative financial law, financial regulation, regulatory theory and compliance, and law and technology in finance.

Professor Castellano’s scholarship examines critical legal and regulatory issues in financial markets, including financial stability, access to credit and development, banking regulation, insurance, data governance, and digital assets. He authored and co-authored over twenty scholarly articles and book chapters and is research has been published in leading international journals, including Law & Social Inquiry (Don’t Call It a Failure: Systemic Risk Governance for Complex Financial Systems), UC Law Journal (Commercial Law Intersections & Financial Data Governance), Berkeley Technology Law Journal (The Transnational Data Governance Problem), Modern Law Review (Reforming Non-Possessory Secured Transactions Laws: A New Strategy?), and Law & Contemporary Problems (Credit Creation: Reconciling Legal and Regulatory Incentives). He is currently completing a book, Getting Credit (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), which provides a comprehensive comparative analysis of law reforms for promoting sustainable access to credit through secured transactions and advancing a new reform strategy. He has served as the Principal Investigator on several research projects, supported by external competitive grants, including the General Research Fund (GRF) in Hong Kong (2020-2023) and multiple awards from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the United Kingdom.

Beyond his academic contributions, Professor Castellano’s research has had a significant impact on global policy and law reforms. He has been working on reforming laws and regulations to promote access to credit and digital finance, advising governments, central banks, and regulators of over 20 jurisdictions across the Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean regions. His research has been informing the policies of multilateral institutions, for which he has been the author or the primary contributor of several policy papers, including those for the World Bank expounding the Regulatory Implications of Integrating Digital Assets and Distributed Ledgers in Credit Ecosystems, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) on Coordinating Prudential Regulation and Secured Transactions Frameworks and on Factoring Regulation and Supervision (Knowledge Guide), and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) on Receivables Finance for MSME Resilience and Economic Growth. For a decade, he served as a Legal Expert for the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), where he negotiated and contributed to the drafting of several soft-law instruments to promote access to credit, including the UNCITRAL Model Law on Secured Transactions. More recently, he has been appointed by the Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) as a member of the Working Group tasked with drafting the UNIDROIT Model Law on Factoring and as a UNIDROIT Delegate for the Study Group on the Private Law of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) at the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH). He is currently an APFF Sherpa, leading a project on Promoting Intellectual Property Financing for Sustainable Development within the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) framework. His scholarly insight and commitment to promoting international dialogue in Hong Kong led to his election as a Board Member of the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong and Macau.

Before joining HKU, Professor Castellano was an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick School of Law. At Warwick, he was a founding faculty member of the Central Banking Qualification programmes delivered by the Warwick Business School to the Bank of England. Previously, he was a Fellow in the Law Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is regularly invited to speak at major conferences in the field of financial law and regulation, and he has held visiting positions at leading research institutions, including the University of Oxford, Columbia Law School, and the Centre for Banking & Finance Law at the National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD in Comparative Law from the University of Turin (Carlo Alberto College), a PhD in Economics and Social Sciences from the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), and a Law Degree from Bocconi University (Milan). He became a Fellow of Advance HE, after being awarded the Postgraduate Certificate in Professional Education by the University of Warwick.