Since the Global Financial Crisis, the structure of financial markets has undergone a dramatic shift. Modern markets have been "zombified" by a combination of Central Bank policy, disintermediation of commercial banks through regulation, and the growth of passive products such as ETFs. Increasingly, risk builds up beneath the surface, through a combination of excessive leverage and crowded exposure to specific asset classes and strategies. In many cases, historical volatility understates prospective risk. This book provides a practical and wide ranging framework for dealing with the credit, positioning and liquidity risk that investors face in the modern age. The authors introduce concrete techniques for adjusting traditional risk measures such as volatility during this era of unprecedented balance sheet expansion. When certain agents in the financial network behave differently or in larger scale than they have in the past, traditional portfolio theory breaks down. It can no longer account for toxic feedback effects within the network. Our feedback-based risk adjustments allow investors to size their positions sensibly in dangerous set ups, where volatility is not providing an accurate barometer of true risk. The authors have drawn from the fields of statistical physics and game theory to simplify and quantify the impact of very large agents on the distribution of forward returns, and to offer techniques for dealing with situations where markets are structurally risky yet realized volatility is low. The concepts discussed here should be of practical interest to portfolio managers, asset allocators, and risk professionals, as well as of academic interest to scholars and theorists.

This is the first book-length treatment of the regulation of financial technology (Fintech) in China. Fintech brings about paradigm changes to the traditional financial system, presenting both challenges and opportunities. At the international level, there has been a fierce competition for the coveted title of global Fintech hub. One of the key enablers of success in this race is regulation. As the world's leader in Fintech, China's regulatory experience is of both academic and practical significance. This book presents a systematic and contextualized account of China's Fintech regulation, and in doing so, tries to identify and analyze relevant institutional factors contributing to the development of the Chinese law. It also takes a comparative approach to critically evaluating the Chinese experience. The book illustrates why and how China's Fintech regulation has been developed, if and how it differs from the rest of the world, and what can be learned from the Chinese experience.

This is the first book-length treatment of the regulation of financial technology (Fintech) in China. Fintech brings about paradigm changes to the traditional financial system, presenting both challenges and opportunities. At the international level, there has been a fierce competition for the coveted title of global Fintech hub. One of the key enablers of success in this race is regulation. As the world's leader in Fintech, China's regulatory experience is of both academic and practical significance. This book presents a systematic and contextualized account of China's Fintech regulation, and in doing so, tries to identify and analyze relevant institutional factors contributing to the development of the Chinese law. It also takes a comparative approach to critically evaluating the Chinese experience. The book illustrates why and how China's Fintech regulation has been developed, if and how it differs from the rest of the world, and what can be learned from the Chinese experience.

Financial modeling is a crucial concept for business leaders to understand and execute effectively, but few have the tools necessary to do so. While many professionals are familiar with financial statements and accounting reports, not many are truly proficient at building an accurate and practical financial model from the ground up. The Handbook of Financial Modeling provides these skills and so much more. Now in its second edition, The Handbook of Financial Modeling takes into account the new tech released since its successful initial release. Author Jack Avon uses his expertise to analyze the changes and improvements in industry-wide financial modeling through the past five years, in addition to instilling core concepts for readers of all experience levels. Approaching your company's financial issues with a modeler's perspective will transform and improve the rest of your business career's trajectory. Financial professionals, students, business leaders, aspiring CFOs, and more will come away with all the tools necessary to precisely and efficiently monitor an organization's assets and project future performance. The engaging case studies and Avon's expert analysis leave you prepared to monitor and predict your organization's finances effectively. Financial modeling's latest technology is at your fingertips, and this book's deep understanding of the topic ensures that you stay ahead of the pack. What You Will Learn Approach financial issues and solutions from a modeler's perspective Discover the importance of thinking about end users when developing a financial model Plan, design, and build a fully functional financial model Who This Book Is ForAnalysts who would typically be middle management, VPs, and associates. It is also written for business graduates and MBA students.

Corporate debt restructurings in the emerging markets have always presented special challenges. Today, as the global economy emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and businesses look to pick up the pieces, this is even more true. For many, the financial hangover of the lockdowns and market disruptions linger and threaten their independence, even their survival. This peril is more acute in the emerging and frontier markets. Weaker economic fundamentals and institutional resiliency often intensify the challenge to return to pre-COVID-19 operating levels and financial sustainability. In this context, borrowers invariably must address the imbalance of substantial existing debt with the "new reality" of their business operations and revenues. This book, using case studies, presents a full, detailed narrative of a fictitious troubled bank in an emerging market, with characters, dialogues, and negotiations. It also includes a series of discussion questions with suggested answers, to draw out key issues from the case. In doing so, this initial narrative offers a substantive analysis of the five main phases and principles of a restructuring: (1) pre-restructuring, (2) the decision to restructure, (3) the case set-up, (4) structuring and negotiation, and lastly (5) implementation. In each chapter, the book outlines the main elements of the phases and shows how the elements are applied in practice. The book also presents separate chapters on exogenous shocks (with a focus on the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of such shocks), macroeconomics, and legal issues present in cross-border restructurings. It will be of interest to the international professional financial and legal community, primarily junior-to mid-level financiers, business people, and lawyers.

This book provides unique information to prepare graduates and newly hired corporate and investment banking professionals for a career in the global markets environment of large universal and international investment banks. It shows the interrelationship between the three specific business functions of sales, trading, and research, as well as the interaction with corporate and institutional clients. The book fills a gap in the available literature by linking financial market theory to the practical aspects of day-to-day operations on a trading floor and offers a taxonomy of the current banking business, providing an in-depth analysis of the main market participants in the global markets ecosystem. Engaging the reader with case studies, anecdotes, and industry color, the book addresses the risks and opportunities of the global markets business in today's global financial markets both from a theoretical and from a practitioner's perspective and focuses on the most important fixed-income financial instruments from a pricing, risk-management, and client-marketing perspective.

This book is an extension of the author's last book (Crisis and Sustainability: The Delusion of Free Markets, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and sheds light on the evolution of the financial system after the 2007/08 crisis and on changes and developments in the regulatory framework that have taken place concurrently over the last ten years. The book's central theme addresses the neoliberal philosophy of financial regulation and, in particular, the role of self-regulating markets in the finance sector and how this has affected incentives and behaviour within the finance sector. The author contends that neoliberal maxims have led us to believe that market-based finance is superior to, and safer than, a more rules-based regulatory regime for the sector, and then explains that experience suggests otherwise. The huge expansion of 'financialization' in the developed economies over the last two decades has greatly magnified the risks emanating from the impact of highly leveraged, risk averse, under-regulated finance on other sectors of these economies. The author concludes that financial institutions need to be encouraged to operate within a more socially responsible matrix that facilitates and promotes long-term economic growth coupled with social stability.

This textbook covers financial systems and services, particularly focusing on present systems and future developments. Broken into three parts, Part One establishes the public institutional framework in which financial services are conducted, defines financial service systems, critically examines the link between finance, wealth and income inequality, and economic growth, challenges conventional paradigms about the raison d'etre of financial institutions and markets, and considers the loss of US financial hegemony to emerging regional entities [BRICS]. Part Two focuses on financial innovation by explaining the impact of the following technologies: cryptography, FinTech, distributed ledger technology, and artificial intelligence. Part Three assesses to what extent financial innovation has disrupted legacy banking and the delivery of financial services, identifies the main obstacles to reconstructing the whole financial system based upon "first principles thinking": Nation State regulation and incumbent interests of multi-national companies, and provides a cursory description of how the pandemic of COVID-19 may establish a "new normal" for the financial services industry. Combining rigorous detail alongside exercises and PowerPoint slides for each chapter, this textbook helps finance students understand the wide breadth of financial systems and speculates the forthcoming developments in the industry. A website to serve as a companion to the textbook is available here: www.johnjaburke.com.

This book provides a hands-on guide to how financial models are actually implemented and used in practice, on a daily basis, for pricing and risk-management purposes. It shows how to put these models into use in production while minimizing the cost of implementation and maximizing robustness and control. Addressing some of the most important and cutting-edge issues, it describes how to build the necessary models in order to risk manage all the costs involved in options fabrication within the world of equity derivatives and hybrids. This is achieved by extending classical models and improving them in order to account for complex features. The book is primarily aimed at market practitioners (traders, risk managers, risk control, top managers), as well as Masters students in Quantitative/Mathematical Finance. It will also be useful for instructors hoping to enrich their courses with practical examples. The prerequisites are basic stochastic calculus and a general knowledge of financial markets and financial derivatives.

The financial markets are a rollercoaster and this book follows the same theme the seduction of money, our ruinous, heady and high stakes pursuit of it, the incredible fortunes and calamitous losses that have been made in its name, the new and significant threat of retail (armchair) investors wanting their piece of the pie, and the perpetual and foolish mismatch that has always existed and will always exist between our evolutionary programming and the design of the financial markets. The dominant theme that runs throughout the book ('Working out Wall Street') is actually a play on words, and relates both to the need to work out why Wall Street traders act so irrationally (e.g. using behavioural finance and evolutionary design to explain herding and panic selling), and the need to use physiological and sport science-related approaches to explain why working out (i.e. adopting exercise and diet-related practices usually applied to athletes) can significantly counter these behaviours. The phrase 'animal spirits' utilised in the concluding chapter title ('Taming Animal Spirits') refers to the seminal work of John Maynard Keynes in his 1936 classic work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and the idea that human emotions-animal spirits- remain a significant driver in (irrational and emotional) investing. The rationale for this book is clear; behavioural finance and neurofinance have opened the floodgates in terms of recognising the role of emotional investing in cyclical boom-and-bust scenarios but what is still missing is an answer to the question So what do we do about it? This book seeks, in as compelling and entertaining a fashion as possible, to provide that answer.

This open access book seeks to foster a multidisciplinary understanding of the ties between faith, financial intermediation, and economic progress by drawing on research across economics, finance, history, philosophy, ethics, theology, public policy, law, and other disciplines. Chapters in this edited volume examine themes as consequential as economic opportunities, real world outcomes and faith; values and consumerism; faith, financial intermediation and economic development in Western and Islamic societies; and the impact of faith issues on US workers, on the workplace and religion, and on the characteristics of good wealth. Though engaging with difficult questions, this book is written in an accessible style to be enjoyed by laypeople and scholars alike.

Distilled small business advice for accounting practices

Many accountants in small and mid-size practices are experts when it comes to their professional knowledge, but may not have considered their practice as much from a business perspective.

Michael Gerber's "The E-Myth Accountant" fills this void, giving you powerful advice on everything you need to run your practice as a successful business, allowing you to achieve your goals and grow your practice. Featuring Gerber's signature easy-to-understand, easy-to-implement style, "The E-Myth Accountant" features
Gerber's universal appeal as a recognized expert on small businesses who has coached, taught, and trained over 60,000 small businessesA recognized and widely respected co-author and leader in the accounting field

"The E-Myth Accountant" is the last guide you'll ever need to make the difference in building or developing your successful accounting practice.

The book investigates the determinants which are influencing the acceptance of artificial intelligence (AI) in an organizational context, focusing on the German financial services industry. An AI-specific acceptance model is being developed based on technology acceptance models as well as being enriched with practical insights from industry experts. Ultimately, the acceptance of artificial intelligence is influenced by multiple, interrelated variables, which can be classified into five major dimensions: organizational, individual, financial, technological and societal factors.

This book demystifies the developments and defines the buzzwords in the wide open space of digitalization and finance, exploring the space of FinTech through the lens of the financial services professional and what they need to know to stay ahead. With chapters focusing on the customer interface, payments, smart contracts, workforce automation, robotics, crypto currencies and beyond, this book aims to be the go-to guide for professionals in financial services and banking on how to better understand the digitalization of their industry. The book provides an outlook of the impact digitalization will have in the daily work of a CFO/CRO and a structural influence to the financial management (including risk management) department of a bank.

Initially, introducing compliance functions within the financial industry had been forced by regulatory scrutiny. Later, it started to spread to other regulated companies, in particular those publicly listed. Now, compliance has become an asset of corporates that want to build their reliability among clients, shareholders, employees and business partners. This book looks at the efficiency of the compliance measures introduced and the best practices of building compliance norms. This recently observed practice of compliance was triggered by the expectation of regulators, shareholders, clients, business partners and the public for robust compliance mechanisms. This book looks at the vast interest in this topic among business people who strive to introduce the systems and the mechanisms of non-compliance risk management in their companies and at the uncountable difficulties and obstacles they meet. The book fills the gap of thorough analysis of this subject by pointing out the solutions successfully introduced in global financial organizations, and would be of interest to academics, researchers and practitioners in corporate finance, corporate governance and risk management.

The growth of Islamic finance today is undeniable given its services, product innovation, performance and achievements, with the Islamic insurance market being no exception; it has retained global market recognition in a parallel platform as Islamic finance moves forward. There is much written regarding the Islamic insurance system, but rarely do researchers present the various Islamic insurance products and their structures in one collective place. This book is a timely addition in meeting contemporary market demands by providing a much-needed overview of the Islamic insurance products and their Shari'ah compliant structures. This book would be of interest to academics, researchers, students and professionals who are seeking to understand the products offered.

Because of the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, the challenges of securing necessary external capital have become more significant for young ventures. In this realm, equity crowdfunding has evolved into the most promising financing alternative for entrepreneurs and received worldwide attention. By focusing on three subsequent research questions, this book aims to contribute to the ongoing scientific discussion of equity crowdfunding. First, it reveals fruitful future research avenues by providing a systematic overview of the development of equity crowdfunding research. Second, it sheds light on the so far less explored investor perspective and analyzes the decision-making process of equity crowdfunding investors. Third, based on a multi-method approach, the questions of how equity crowdfunding investors evaluate radically innovative ventures and how radically innovative ventures can establish venture legitimacy are explored.

In a new world characterized by more frequent and rich flows of information, with more efficient and plenty of available external capital, how will the - simultaneous - investment and divestment decisions be affected? This book thoroughly covers the main features and relevance of asset sales as an integral component of many companies' growth strategies in the current and continually evolving corporate finance eco-system. After an introductory section on the relevance of asset sales in corporations (both non-financial and financial), it discusses the corporate asset market and the mechanisms of asset sale transactions. The focus then turns to the theory of finance in asset sales (the efficiency and financing theory) and the extensive empirical literature now available. In light of recent and rapid technological and digital advances, a concluding section presents new perspectives on analyzing asset sales transactions. Chiefly intended as a primer for PhD students and academics, the book offers roadmaps for the empirical research landscape and suggests future research directions.

This book proposes three normative frameworks pertaining to risk-measurement, disclosure and governance using expert opinion and data from the top 429 non-financial companies (of the NIFTY 500 index) over a 10-year period. The book offers a novel contribution to the global literature on disclosure quality by presenting a composite measure of the quality as well as quantity of risk disclosures. Focusing on the quality of risk disclosures and risk governance structures, and using sophisticated methodology to tackle the issue of endogeneity, the book explores the important yet uncharted confluence of accounting information, risk and corporate governance. It addresses the interplay between three facets of risk, and is corroborated by practitioners' perspectives as well as case studies. It is an excellent resource for practitioners, professionals and policy-makers, in addition to researchers working on the topic.

This concise book for practitioners presents the statistical analysis of operational risk, which is considered the most relevant source of bank risk, after market and credit risk. The book shows that a careful statistical analysis can improve the results of the popular loss distribution approach. The authors identify the risk classes by applying a pooling rule based on statistical tests of goodness-of-fit, use the theory of the mixture of distributions to analyze the loss severities, and apply copula functions for risk class aggregation. Lastly, they assess operational risk data in order to estimate the so-called capital-at-risk that represents the minimum capital requirement that a bank has to hold. The book is primarily intended for quantitative analysts and risk managers, but also appeals to graduate students and researchers interested in bank risks.

This open access Pivot demonstrates how a variety of technologies act as innovation catalysts within the banking and financial services sector. Traditional banks and financial services are under increasing competition from global IT companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon and PayPal whilst facing pressure from investors to reduce costs, increase agility and improve customer retention. Technologies such as blockchain, cloud computing, mobile technologies, big data analytics and social media therefore have perhaps more potential in this industry and area of business than any other. This book defines a fintech ecosystem for the 21st century, providing a state-of-the art review of current literature, suggesting avenues for new research and offering perspectives from business, technology and industry.

This book examines the complexity of trading and the creation of liquidity. Titled after the Baruch College Financial Markets Conference, Equity Market Round-Up: Proposals for Strengthening the Markets, this book explores how regulation has a clear impact on market structure and, therefore, how market structure impacts efficient trading and capital formation. The following questions are analyzed: What are the liquidity strategies for pricing and interacting? Is liquidity any more available today for an illiquid stock than it was on the floor of the exchange 20 years ago? How do we cope with the dynamics of a continuous market? How can market structure be improved? What are the effects of high frequency trading? The Zicklin School of Business Financial Markets Series presents the insights emerging from a sequence of conferences hosted by the Zicklin School at Baruch College for industry professionals, regulators, and scholars. The transcripts from the conferences are edited for clarity, perspective and context; material and comments from subsequent interviews with the panelists and speakers are included for a complete thematic presentation. Each book is focused on a well delineated topic, but all deliver broad insights into the quality and efficiency of the U.S. equity markets and the dynamic forces that are changing them.

This open access volume of the AIDA Europe Research Series on Insurance Law and Regulation offers the first comprehensive legal and regulatory analysis of the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD). The IDD came into force on 1 October 2018 and regulates the distribution of insurance products in the EU. The book examines the main changes accompanying the IDD and analyses its impact on insurance distributors, i.e., insurance intermediaries and insurance undertakings, as well as the market. Drawing on interrelations between the rules of the Directive and other fields that are relevant to the distribution of insurance products, it explores various topics related to the interpretation of the IDD - e.g. the harmonization achieved under it; its role as a benchmark for national legislators; and its interplay with other regulations and sciences - while also providing an empirical analysis of the standardised pre-contractual information document. Accordingly, the book offers a wealth of valuable insights for academics, regulators, practitioners and students who are interested in issues concerning insurance distribution.

Africa is at a critical moment in its economic development. With the recent decline of commodity prices, it has become apparent that many African economies, which are resource-based, have suffered greatly. The economies of Africa cannot be lifted up only through programs of aid. Indigenous high-impact entrepreneurs are needed, as they know how to best inspire, act as role models for other Africans and serve their fellow entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurial ventures in the financial services sector hold special importance because of the role that they play in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. Financial services are an essential element in powering entrepreneurial activity beyond resource extraction, yet in most sub-Saharan African countries, the financial services sector is relatively nascent compared to developed markets. This book highlights how this is beginning to change. With contributions from leading scholars, it provides inspiring success stories of entrepreneurial financial sector ventures that are making a lasting contribution to the economic development of various sub-Saharan African countries as well as helping the reader understand larger macro-trends.

Despite growing discussions on the relationship between sustainability and finance, so far little attention has been given to the relation linking sustainability-related risks and financial risks. Climate change, environmental degradation and social inequality, among others factors, may indeed have considerable adverse impacts on financial actors and markets, and even have the potential to harm financial stability. Shedding light on the importance of the nexus between sustainability and financial risks, this book addresses the need for new industry and policy approaches. With insights from a skilled set of scholars in the finance field, this edited collection explores the effects of climate risks on the banking and insurance industries, the problem of stranded assets, the possible corporate risk management frameworks that could be used to control sustainability-related risks, the role of non-financial disclosure in fostering market discipline, and the policy actions needed to integrate sustainability considerations into prudential supervision. Tackling an interdisciplinary topic, this book will appeal to academics and practitioners within the finance, business and sustainability fields.