This book offers overviews of issues in banking sector reform and capital markets in Central and Eastern Europe, China and Israel.

This book presents a collection of state-of-the-art research findings on the digital transformation of financial services. Digitalization has fundamentally changed financial services and has a tendency to reshape the landscape of the financial industry in an unprecedented manner. Over the last ten years, the development of new financial technologies has contributed to the creation of new business and organizational models, along with new approaches to service delivery. By encompassing significant conceptual contributions, innovations in methods and techniques, and by delineating the main applications of digital transformation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the volume extends current knowledge on digital transformation in the financial industry. The book is divided into two parts. The first part provides a social-science perspective on digital transformation in the financial industry. The second part provides the most recent evidence on how financial technologies are transforming financial services on the markets, and how the adoption of modern information technologies fosters setting up new financial services. Further, this part outlines new approaches to digital transformation in the financial industry. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of finance, monetary economics, and business, as well as practitioners interested in a better understanding of the digital transformation of financial services, new financial technologies, and innovations in finance.

This book investigates the regulation and promotion of financial inclusion and provides a comparative analysis of the regulation, promotion and enforcement of the relevant laws in the SADC (in particular, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe), as well as the challenges of financial inclusion. In turn, it evaluates financial inclusion in the context of specific challenges faced by unbanked and underbanked customers, who are easy targets for cyber criminals because they tend to have lower levels of digital literacy. The book presents novel discussions that identify the challenges and flaws associated with the enforcement of financial inclusion laws and related measures intended to promote financial inclusion in the SADC region. This is primarily done in order to reveal the current strengths and weaknesses of financial inclusion laws in relation to certain aspects of the companies, securities and financial markets in the region. For example, there is no common financial inclusion instrument/law that is effectively and uniformly applied throughout the SADC. This has impeded the enforcement authorities’ efforts to effectively combat financial exclusion across the region.The book is likely the most comprehensive study to date on the regulation and promotion of financial inclusion in the SADC region and fills a major gap in SADC and African legal jurisprudence. As such, it offers a valuable asset for policymakers, attorneys, bankers, securities (share) holders, and other market participants who deal with financial inclusion, as well as undergraduate and graduate students interested in the topic.

The analysis in this book reflects various aspects of financial sector transformation in selected Central European countries that are expected to join the EU in 2004. The authors are Central European financial experts who provide, among other things, a detailed overview of the following main topics: Banking Regulation and Supervision; Concentration and Efficiency of the Banking Sectors; Financial (banking) crises in selected Central European countries; and Monetary and Exchange Rate Development. The results of the research done by these authors reflect an interesting fact: that there exist important differences in the financial sector development even in the relatively homogeneous group of selected Central European countries, namely the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.

The present book is a collection of studies presented at the 10th International Conference on Finance and Banking which took place at Silesian University - School of Business Administration in Karviná, Czech Republic on October 19 - 20, 2005. All papers presented at the conference have been peer-reviewed and, consequently, the nine best papers that discuss issues corresponding with the book’s focus have been selected by the editors for publication in this book. In spite of the fact that the book is a collection of independent studies it represents a comprehensive and consistent work. All studies (book chapters) are tied together by common references. Through original research, the book will cover various aspects of financial and banking sectors in new EU-member countries, giving a comparison of their development to financial sectors of developed countries. Special attention is paid to prospective integration of the new EU-member countries to the European Economic and Monetary Union and the implications for national economic policies. Generally, the book we are offering gives very deep insight into the financial sector of new EU-member countries written by a very interesting group of authors. It combines young and promising economists with respected researchers living in new as well as in traditional EU countries and working in various ways with the financial sector. The book successfully pulls together theory and actual development of financial sectors in new EU-member countries. Moreover, a rich blend of applied theory and actual practice makes the book attractive for a wide spectrum of readers.

This fascinating and timely work explores in detail the changes in the Indian banking sector over the last 20 years, and puts them into a comparative perspective with the Chinese banking sector. For this purpose, the author develops a detailed indicator-based framework for assessing the liberalization of a banking sector along various process steps based on financial liberalization and transformation studies. The key finding is that while liberalization has improved the sectoral performance, it has so far had no effect on the macro level.

The basic question of this book is what we can learn from empirical as well as theoretical analysis of financial systems, differing cross-sectional and changing structually over time, with respect to the issue of stability of financial systems. Part I of the book deals with stability issues in a globalizing financial world and addresses topics of convergence, domestic policy, financial bubbles, crises and international coordination. Part II is on banking systems. Country specific adoption and restructuring of (universal but also separation) banking systems are key problems for the industrialized economies, while catching-up is of major concern for the economies in transition. Feeble regional economies and subsidized banking is at the heart of the vivid dispute on public sector banking being taken up in Part III. The last Part is devoted to resource-oriented approaches in quantifiying financial development and risk of sovereign default.

The book provides deep insight into the processes of digital transformation of banking according to economic, institutional, and social dimensions. Together with the transformation of incumbent banks, the processes result in changes in the scope of existing banking services. Moreover, new entities (FinTech firms) partner with incumbent banks and reshape the banking sector and its financial environment. The far-reaching transformation of banks and the banking sectors is accompanied by some institutional and socioeconomic processes. Regarding institutional processes, the book provides insight into the digitalization of the banking sector from a legal point of view. Traditionally, banking is strongly regulated by norms and rules and this status should be maintained when new entities are entering the sector and/or when new technological solutions contribute to the provision of banking services. Regarding socioeconomic processes, it must be highlighted that digitalization is exerting a powerful impact on societies. One significant example, among others, is the increase in the financial inclusion of disadvantaged groups (especially customers either underserved by the traditional financial sector or unbanked). The socioeconomic aspect, however, has a much greater dimension and its selected aspects are described in this book. The principal audience of the book will be scholars in the fields of banking and finance, but also other related disciplines in the social sciences that are of particular relevance to the banking sector’s digital transformation. This includes legal science, management, and psychology. The book also targets professionals in the financial industry interested in the impact of new financial technologies on banking sectors and bank services, particularly with a main focus on legal and socioeconomic dimensions.

The implementation of a twin peaks model represents a significant change to the South African financial supervisory architecture. The Prudential Authority (PA), operating within the administration of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), is responsible for promoting and enhancing the safety and soundness of financial institutions that provide financial products and securities services. A separate authority, the Financial Sector Conduct Authority2 (FSCA), is responsible for market conduct regulation and supervision. The introduction of the twin peaks architecture was motivated by a need to increase the robustness of the financial sector regulatory and supervisory system, reinforce financial stability, improve protection of customers, and enhance cooperation among the regulators.

This volume argues that good governance is crucial to the success of any regulatory regime, and explores how better governance of the financial sector can be achieved.