From Paper Securities to Digital Securities

Hubert de VAUPLANE * Avocat au barreau de Paris, Sciences Po (Paris). Contact : hubert.devauplane@sciencespo.fr.

Financial assets are an increasingly important part of the wealth of economic agents. In the same way that the economy has followed technological change from an industrial economy to a service economy, the form in which securities are represented has changed drastically over the last fifty years, from paper securities to digital securities. However, the legal issues related to this transformation are not neutral since it is no less a question of determining the nature of the rights that the holders of these assets have over them. Whereas in their paper form the traditional legal analysis considered that the holders of these securities had a right of ownership, to what extent does their transformation into “dematerialised securities” and now into digital securities call into question this qualification?