The Future of Financial Markets

The Future of Financial Markets provides a comprehensive review of the prospects for financial markets in the face of rapid technological development and international integration. It offers a revolutionary perspective, exploring the challenges for regulators and demonstrating a network economics approach to explain the failure of e-money to develop.

Author’s Introduction:

In this book we take a tour of the problems, the way they are developing, the ways they could proceed and the benefits these could deliver. This gives us considerable implications for policy, which is really the purpose of the book. We start with the most familiar market, that for payments, moving from cash through current systems towards a focus on possible future electronic payment systems that operate as simply as the Internet, without the need for central parties.

From the individual’s point of view, transactions could be via a computer or a mobile phone as well as through the conventional routes of retail outlets, whether through machines or over the counter with human beings. One of the features, which is immediately apparent, is how different countries currently are in their use of the different payments media – cash, cheques, debit cards, credit cards and so on. Changes in the use of these different media have been equally dramatic.

We deal with e-money separately at the end of the book, not because it is conceptually different but because unlike the other systems that have developed far faster than people imagined two or three decades ago, e-money has stalled in many respects. We may have cards with stored value that enable us to use telephones or travel on public transport and be charged at the time but such cards are not (yet) substituting for cash, whose use is actually rising in some of the countries where it had reached the lowest levels. Our concern in that last chapter is to explain why it has stalled and what that implies for any further developments.

Contents: