Financial services regulation and the Internet

The great attractions of the Internet are its flexibility and its international reach and, some might say, its anarchic nature. However, a company planning advertising or trading on the Internet must not assume that it is not regulated. This is simply not true. This paper focuses primarily on the regulation affecting advertising and the financial services sector (which is already a heavily regulated area in its own right). Financial services companies should be aware, however, that there is a raft of other relevant legislation, such as data protection (including the trail‐blazing data protection bill published on 14th January 1998) which is required to implement a 1995 EU Data Protection Directive in the United Kingdom.