Ross P. Buckley

Ross P. Buckley is a Laureate Fellow and a Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney).

He was appointed to the Payments System Board of the Reserve Bank of Australia for a five‑year term in July 2023. The Payments System Board directs payments system policy for the Reserve Bank of Australia.

As an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, he leads a $2.6 million five-year research project into the regulation of the data revolution. He is a lead investigator on an ARC Discovery Project on China’s Belt and Road Initiative and on major research projects in Hong Kong and Qatar on the regulation of FinTech.

Early life and education
Buckley was born in Brisbane. He has degrees in Economics and Law (with honours) from the University of Queensland. He completed a PhD at UNSW, and, more recently, an LLD at the University of Melbourne.

Career
Buckley began his career in Brisbane with the predecessor firm to Allens Linklaters. He was with Deacons in Hong Kong for a year, before moving to New York City as an associate at Davis Polk for three years. He is admitted to practise law in Queensland and the Southern District of New York.

Ross joined the law faculty at Bond University, where he led the Tim Fischer Centre for Global Trade and Finance for seven years.

Buckley joined the law faculty at UNSW in 2007. He was appointed a Scientia Professor and to the King & Wood Mallesons Chair in International Finance Law in 2013. In 2018, KPMG joined an expanded sponsorship of this position, which was renamed the KPMG Law – King & Wood Mallesons Professorship of Disruptive Innovation. He held this Chair for a decade, ending in 2023.

Buckley began serving his five-year term on the Payments System Board of the Reserve Bank of Australia in July 2023. He has chaired the Digital Finance Advisory Panel of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission since 2017.

Research and publications
Buckley's research has attracted around A$10 million in grant funding. His earlier work was mostly on the regulation of the global financial system. This culminated in a book with Douglas Arner, From Crisis to Crisis: The Global Financial System and Regulatory Failure, published by Kluwer.

In 2013, he started researching the regulation of mobile money in developing countries, in response in part to a request from Timor Leste for assistance on these issues.

In 2015, he wrote an article with Douglas Arner and Janos Barberis that has been cited over 1,000 times on the Evolution of Fintech.

Buckley has written five books, edited five books, and written over 160 book chapters and articles in leading journals in all major jurisdictions. Of late, much of his research has been with Douglas Arner of the University of Hong Kong and Dirk Zetzsche of the University of Luxembourg.

Buckley has twice been a Fulbright Scholar, at Yale and Duke.

Consultancies
Buckley has served as a consultant to the Asian Development Bank and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion.

He has consulted to government departments in 12 nations, including, in the US, to the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.