| dc.description.abstract | Banking and financial markets have been subject to significant change in recent decades. Markets have benefited from substantial advances in all forms of technological operation including computer hardware and software capability, massive downsizing in circuitry and processors, telecommunications speed and efficiency, mobile access, in particular, through mobile telephony, tablets, and other hand-held devices, and wearables, and substantial reductions in manufacturing and sendee costs. Parallel deregulatory processes in many market sectors including banking, securities, and insurance as well as telecommunications and media services have accompanied all of this. Deregulation has substantially increased capital and investment flows in banking and financial markets which has, in turn, increased liquidity and reduced borrowing and funding costs significantly. International financial markets are nevertheless also still dealing with the significant costs and impacts of the global financial crisis beginning in 2007-2008. Substantial recent advances in financial technology and FinTech sendee and product models have then created important possible opportunities for growth with increased efficiency and earnings in the aftermath of the crisis; although, this has also created significant new threats especially in terms of market and counterparty fragmentation, and consequent regulatory and supervisory dislocation, disconnection, division, depletion, and distraction as well as a resource demand and potential skills deficit. FinTech has emerged as a powerful new market force as a result of the coming together of a number of disconnected trends. Significant advances have occurred in the areas of computer and digital technology, the Internet, mobile telecommunications as well as economics and finance, which have transformed traditional areas of study and created important potential new business structures and operations. The Internet, or World Wide Web (www),1 specifically has emerged from two earlier phases of the static Net 1, to the interactive Net 2, with the current phase constituting the beginning of Net 3 | en_US |
