As a leader in your organization, you will be very familiar with your organization’s key financial statements and monthly management reports. You may have spent countless hours discussing budgets and expenditures. But how much time have you spent reflecting on the fact that these revenues are generated by actual customers—the people who pull out their wallets and pay for your products and services? In The Customer-Base Audit: The First Step on the Journey to Customer Centricity, experts Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross start you on the path toward really getting to understand your customers’ buying behavior as well as the health of your overall customer base. A customer-base audit is a systematic review of the buying behavior of a firm’s customers using data captured by its transaction systems. It will help you answer questions such as: -- How healthy is your customer base? How realistic are your growth objectives? -- How do your customers differ in terms of their behavior and value? -- How has the quality of your customers changed over time? -- What changes in customer behavior lie behind period-to-period changes in firm performance? -- What is important to your high-value customers? Which products help you acquire and retain your best customers? Fader, Hardie, and Ross present five “lenses” through which an executive can address questions like those above. The answers are often lurking in various parts of the organization, but it is rare to find all the relevant analyses in one place, let alone performed on a regular basis (as an audit should be). Yet without such a basic, systematic understanding of the foundations of the firm’s primary source of cash flow, how can executives make informed decisions? Fader, a Wharton professor, is the author of Customer Centricity and coauthor of The Customer Centricity Playbook, both of which have helped businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. In this first step of the journey, Fader, Hardie, and Ross assist leaders in gaining a fundamental understanding of their customers’ buying behavior—and thus their company as a whole.

This is the first detailed study of how Bernard L. Madoff and his accomplices perpetrated a Ponzi scheme of epic proportions-what has been referred to as the "con of the century." In December 2008, Bernard L. Madoff was arrested for perpetrating a protracted Ponzi scheme of inconceivably huge proportions that defrauded clients of his securities company of nearly $20 billion-and was consequently sentenced to 150 years in jail. How did Madoff pull this off for years, even returning some or all of clients' money when they asked, while in actuality was financing the lavish lifestyles of himself, his family, and his accomplices with the stolen funds? And why didn't anyone in the highly regulated investment industry catch on sooner? Bernard Madoff and His Accomplices: Anatomy of a Con examines Bernard L. Madoff's unprecedented confidence game (con game), drawing back the curtain on what actually went on at his investment firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, and exposing the day-to-day activities of his accomplices that enabled the elaborate con to succeed for as long as it did. Through the examination of court testimony and other court documents, the mechanics of the con game become clear, elucidating how Madoff's friends and employees hustled money from investors; the methods by which false records, monthly statements to investors, and other documents were manufactured and mass-produced; and how a multitude of felonies and the highest levels of fraud became everyday practices. Presents the first study of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the organization where the fraud began, was centered, and flourished by duping investors for at least a decade Documents how investors who depend on and trust investment professionals can lose money, especially given that some investment companies do not always act in their clients' best interests and that Wall Street regulators are often ineffective Takes readers backstage to see the intricate details of the "theatre production" of a con game-the playacting, performances, pretending, utilization of props, and false representations that are required to achieve a "standing ovation" (i.e., the total fleecing of the marks)

FinTech is encouraging various new practices, such as diminishing the use of cash in different countries, increasing rate of mobile payments, and introducing new algorithms for high-frequency trading across national boundaries. It is paving the way for new technologies emerging in the information technology scene that allow financial service firms to automate existing business processes and offer new products, including crowdfunding or peer-to-peer insurance. These new products cater to hybrid client interaction and customer self-services, changing the ecosystem by increasing outsourcing for focused specialization by resizing and leading to new ecosystems and new regulations for encouraging FinTech. However, such new ecosystems are also accompanied by new challenges. Innovative Strategies for Implementing FinTech in Banking provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of technology inclusion in the financial sector and applications within global financing. It provides a clear direction for the effective implementation of FinTech initiatives/programs for improving banking financial processes, financial organizational learning, and performance excellence. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as artificial intelligence, social financing, and customer satisfaction, this book encourages the management of the financial industry to take a proactive attitude toward FinTech, resulting in a better decision-making capability that will support financial organizations in their journey towards becoming FinTech-based organizations. As such, this book is ideally designed for financial analysts, finance managers, finance administrators, banking professionals, IT consultants, researchers, academics, students, and practitio

This book introduces the reader to a proven technique which can be utilised by anyone who is looking to invest in property. The `quantum' strategy advocated in this book is a proven method suited for those trying to buy below-market-value property or for those trying to increase their property portfolio in a cost-effective way. This book is wholly practical: it takes the reader through various stages of property transactions. It also includes a vast range of examples that can be adapted to meet the reader's needs. Some of the unique topics covered in this book include: How to increasing your wealth through "leveraging" How to increasing your property portfolio through "velocity" How to increasing the value of your property through "value engineering" How to access the property market without investing any money How to increasing your confidence through tried and tested formula essential for a successful property investment.

Two of the most important factors contributing to national and international economy are processing of information for accurate financial forecasting and decision making as well as processing of information for efficient control of manufacturing systems for increased productivity. The associated problems are very complex and conventional methods often fail to produce acceptable solutions. Moreover, businesses and industries always look for superior solutions to boost profitability and productivity. In recent times, artificial neural networks have demonstrated promising results in solving many real-world problems in these domains, and these techniques are increasingly gaining business and industry acceptance among the practitioners. ""Artificial Neural Networks in Finance and Manufacturing"" presents many state-of-the-art and diverse applications to finance and manufacturing, along with underlying neural network theories and architectures. It offers researchers and practitioners the opportunity to access exciting and cutting-edge research focusing on neural network applications, combining two aspects of economic domain in a single and consolidated volume.

With incisive critical ana lysis and historical examples, "The Great Crash Ahead "lays bare the traditional assumptions of economics, outlining why the next financial crash and crisis is inevitable, and just around the corner-- coming between mid-2012 and early 2015. Widely respected in the financial world for his accurate forecasts, Harry S. Dent, Jr., shows that the government doesn't drive our economy, consumers and businesses do; that the Fed does not create most of the money in our economy, the private banking system does. This necessary and illuminating book gives very clear strategies for prospering in the challenging decade ahead . . . a world turned upside down.

In 1918, the Soviet revolutionary government repudiated the Tsarist regime's sovereign debt, triggering one of the biggest sovereign defaults ever. Yet the price of Russian bonds remained high for years. Combing French archival records, Kim Oosterlinck shows that, far from irrational, investors had legitimate reasons to hope for repayment. Soviet debt recognition, a change in government, a bailout by the French government, or French banks, or a seceding country would have guaranteed at least a partial reimbursement. As Greece and other European countries raise the possibility of sovereign default, Oosterlinck's superbly researched study is more urgent than ever.

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a free trade agreement between the Asia-Pacific nations of Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. The 15 member countries account for about 30% of the world's population and 30% of global GDP as of 2020, making it the biggest trade bloc in history. It is expected to eliminate about 90% of the tariffs on imports between its signatories within 20 years of coming into force, and establish common rules for e-commerce, trade, and intellectual property. The unified rules of origin will help facilitate international supply chains and reduce export costs throughout the bloc. The emergence of Financial Technology (FinTech) related products are major disruptions in financial services including in RCEP that enables financial solutions and innovative business models resulting the fusion of finance and smart mobile technology. FinTech includes five major areas which are finance and investment, operations and risk management, payments and infrastructure, data security and monetization, and customer interface. Since RCEP will strengthen economic linkages and to enhance trade and investment the book will portray and assess FinTech's adoption, challenges, and its potentials to facilitate RCEP. The book will overcome solid knowledge dissemination of FinTech's development in RCEP featuring conceptual, case studies, recent development, best practices, comparative assessment, business processes, as well as strategies and outputs in studies of FinTech from multi-domains of knowledge. Therefore, the book seeks to move beyond the theoretical areas of FinTech to comprehensively explore the recent FinTech initiative in RCEP scenarios with respect to processes, strategies, challenges, lessons learned, as well as outcomes. In addition, the book highlights in new business models, applications, processes, products, or services with an associated material effect on financial markets and institutions and the provision of financial services.

This book is an introduction to the mathematical analysis of probability theory and provides some understanding of how probability is used to model random phenomena of uncertainty, specifically in the context of finance theory and applications. The integrated coverage of both basic probability theory and finance theory makes this book useful reading for advanced undergraduate students or for first-year postgraduate students in a quantitative finance course.The book provides easy and quick access to the field of theoretical finance by linking the study of applied probability and its applications to finance theory all in one place. The coverage is carefully selected to include most of the key ideas in finance in the last 50 years.The book will also serve as a handy guide for applied mathematicians and probabilists to easily access the important topics in finance theory and economics. In addition, it will also be a handy book for financial economists to learn some of the more mathematical and rigorous techniques so their understanding of theory is more rigorous. It is a must read for advanced undergraduate and graduate students who wish to work in the quantitative finance area.

Whether you are an executive or a student, beginner or expert, this book is designed to explain and illustrate the working essentials of finance with clarity and speed. This desktop companion deliberately combines essential theory with real-world application, using short, focused chapters to help you find what you need and implement it right away. www.pearsoned.co.uk/estrada