Professor Giuliano G. CastellanoAssociate Professor of Law, University of Hong Kong
Professor Giuliano G. Castellano is an Associate Professor and a Deputy Director of the Asian Institute of International Financial Law at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), Faculty of Law. At HKU, Giuliano teaches and conducts research in the areas of financial and commercial law, with a specialization in financial regulation and regulatory compliance. He holds a Law Degree from Bocconi University, a Ph.D. in Economics and Social Sciences (Management) from the École Polytechnique (Paris), and a Ph.D. in Comparative Law from the University of Turin (Collegio Carlo Alberto). Before taking his current post at HKU, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick; prior to that, he was a Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Department of Law.
Beyond academia, Giuliano advises international organizations and governments on several projects concerning financial inclusion and sustainable development. For over a decade, he served as a member of the Italian delegation at the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) to prepare international legal standards fostering access to credit. In particular, he negotiated and contributed to the drafting of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Secured Transactions, adopted in 2016 to promote legal harmonization on the law governing security rights in tangible and intangible assets, including intellectual property. In 2020, he was appointed by the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) as a member of the working group tasked to elaborate the UNIDROIT Factoring Model Law, adopted in 2023 to set a global template on the rules governing receivables financing, such as those arising from intellectual property and data transactions. He’s a member of the Experts Group on CBDCs at the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH).
Giuliano has been actively involved in reform projects in more than 30 economies worldwide, focusing on financial regulatory policies, digitalization, and access to credit. Since 2016, he has been working with domestic development agencies, as well as multilateral development institutions, including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank Group (WBG) to advise domestic policymakers on the implementation of reform strategies to establish a sound and inclusive credit ecosystem. Based on this experience and research, Giuliano authored several policy papers, including the WBG's Note on "Regulatory Implications of Integrating Digital Assets and Distributed Ledgers in Credit Ecosystems" (2020), the EBRD's report on "New Finance Support: Receivables Finance for MSME Resilience and Economic Growth" (2023), and the IFC’s "Knowledge Guide on Factoring Regulation and Supervision" (2024). Since 2022, he has been serving as a Member of the Executive Committee (2022-present) of the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong and Macau.
