Duty to Contract and Financial Stability

Abstract The cases of duty to contract discussed in Chapter 4 can be regarded as fairly mainstream. Anyone who follows the news a little knows that businesses that operate in sectors vulnerable to corruption have difficulty opening a bank account. In this chapter, I propose to focus on two rather more exotic examples of a duty to contract in the financial sector: (i) duty to contract and central counterparties; (ii) duty to contract and critical providers of information and communication technology services to financial entities. What the two cases have in common is that here, the aim of the duty to contract is not to protect the weaker party but to try to boost financial stability.