The financial services industry is changing under the stimulus of advances in information technology (IT), telecommunications, and the Internet. Technological innovations and growing customer demand and sophistication have led to the emergence of new electronic financial markets, organizational forms for financial services firms, products, and product delivery capabilities. This special issue highlights Information Systems (IS) research on management topics in the financial services that involve IT. The authors utilize a mix of research methodologies to examine a range of innovative applications of IT in the financial services industry.

The methods and thinking of economics permeate a large part of the IS discipline. Reciprocally, newly emerging research methods relying on the IT-enabled treatment of massive data aggregates feed economic research. As new and radical forms of IT innovation continue to energize electronic commerce, IS researchers face a daunting task in using existing empirical methods and tools to understand the threats, opportunities, risks, and rewards of these new techniques. This groundbreaking volume leads the way. It introduces new methodological approaches to data analysis as well as new techniques for collecting and cataloging transactional data. The ideas it presents have broad appeal and demonstrate what is possible when new techniques and new ways of thinking are brought to bear on complex research problems.