The preceding discussions have shown, in particular, how market infrastructures are connected to a legal order and how the law of the financial market is deployed by relying on the connecting factor of the trading platform. The following developments extend these reflections to the status of financial instruments. The influence of the law of the central depository and the clearing house on the proprietary status of financial securities and on the law applicable to financial contracts will be shown. This influence is independent of the financial market, simply because financial instruments can be provided independently of a financial market. The use of a financial market nevertheless implies the use of the services of the clearing house and the central depository as soon as a financial contract or the exchange of a security is concluded through a trading platform.

In the case of securities, the main difficulty today lies in the connecting factor to their proprietary effect. It will be shown that these difficulties, which have their roots in the thesis of the plurality of connections, should be resolved, both in the direct and indirect holding system, by a unitary solution of the conflict of laws. In the indirect holding system, this solution should be based on the connection of the securities settlement system itself (Title 1).

From the point of view of financial contracts, the law applicable to them sometimes suffers from uncertainty when purely domestic contracts or consumer contracts are involved. The difficulty facing the status of financial contracts is, however, less related to the determination of the lex contractus than to its reconciliation with the laws that affect the formation of the contract and its performance. It is in this latter respect that the law of the compensation system will most often extend its realm to the entire lex contractus (Title 2).