The social media faces of major global financial service brands

With the advent of social media, brand management has become not only more difficult, but also increasingly critical to the credibility and reputation of firms. Moreover, consumer-generated content and its rapid diffusion takes control over advertising-intended messages away from brand managers. Financial services brand managers will not fully be able to control the destinies of their brands, but at the very least they need to be involved in the conversations that speak about their brand. This article suggests a powerful analytical tool Chernoff Faces, which can add to financial service brand managers’ arsenal.     

The end stage of a financial service product

This paper considers product elimination in the financial services sector. Specifically it identifies the factors that cause an organisation to question the viability of a product — a key element of effective end-stage product management. A questionnaire was mailed to 196 individuals with experience of product elimination in retail banks, building societies and retail insurance organisations. Fifty-six usable questionnaires were returned. It was found that there were 32 key drivers of product elimination. These were grouped into eight interrelated areas: product led; strategic led; customer led; cost led; information technology led; operational led; personnel led; and externally led. It was also found that there were three functional conditions characterising the nature of the drivers: an elimination driver seldom appears without warning; the organisation generates the majority of reasons for product removal; the causes of elimination tend to reflect the overall operating context of the business. It is concluded that focusing on past elimination may not be helpful in predicting future requirements. Effective product elimination requires that organisations are able to identify drivers and be willing to act upon them. Many drivers are within the organisations' control and it is often the action (or inaction) of the organisation that creates the need for elimination.     

Civil liberties and social and environmental information transparency: A global investigation of financial institutions

Civil liberties enable the media, social movements, and other stakeholders to expect companies to be more transparent and forthcoming with relevant social and environmental information. Drawing on social movement theory in general, and the notion of civil liberty in particular, we analyse the availability of social and environmental information of 300 financial companies from 50 countries over a nine-year period, to investigate the influence of country-level civil liberties on the availability of social and environmental information.We find that companies headquartered in countries with high levels of civil liberties make more social and environmental information publicly available than companies headquartered in countries with low levels of civil liberties. Furthermore, an improvement in civil liberties in countries with lower civil liberties has a bigger impact on changes in the availability of social and environmental information.Our research is relevant for the ongoing concerns of social and environmental transparency initiatives by governments, NGOs, and civil rights organisations. Policy implications for countries with lower civil liberties (typical developing nations) are that if they wish to encourage more transparent corporate information, they need to strengthen their country-level civil liberties.     

An ontological artifact for classifying social media: Text mining analysis for financial data

In this paper we utilize a structured natural language processing implementation of the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) to extract financial information from the unstructured textual data of the social media platform Twitter regarding financial and budget information in the public sector, namely the two public-private agencies of the Port Authority of NY and NJ (PANYNJ), and the NY Metropolitan Transportation Agency (MTA). This research initiative uses the Design Science Research (DSR) perspective to develop an artifact to classify tweets as being either relevant to financial bonds or not. We apply a frame and slot approach from the artificial intelligence and natural language processing literature to operationalize this artifact. FIBO provides standards for defining the facts, terms, and relationships associated with financial concepts. We show that FIBO grammar can be used to mine semantic meaning from unstructured textual data and that it provides a nuanced representation of structured financial data. With this artifact, social media such as Twitter may be accessed for the knowledge that its text contains about financial concepts using the FIBO ontology. This process is anticipated to be of interest to bond issuers, regulators, analysts, investors, and academics. It may also be extended towards other financial domains such as securities, derivatives, commodities, and banking that relate to FIBO ontologies, as well as more generally to develop a structured knowledge representation of unstructured data through the application of an ontology.     

金融自助服务进入精益服务时代

世纪之交是中国金融业厉兵秣马加速金融改革的时期，金融自助服务以其先进的经营手段赢得了中国银行业极大的重视，随着ATM应用的普及，银行用户越来越意识到ATM的作用不仅是存款和取款，更重要的是它能增加银行与客户接触的渠道．客户通过ATM可以感受到银行的服务品质．而银行也希望通过ATM进行客户关系管理．掌握客户信息，有针对性的推出营销服务。可以说．在当今激烈的市场竞争时代，金融自助服务是银行获得差异化竞争优势的重要方式之一。     

全球经济后危机时代应加强社会保障服务

亚洲开发银行（以下简称“亚行”）行长黑田东彦（Haruhiko Kuroda）表示：全球经济危机表明,要实现可持续的共享式经济增长,亚太地区必须实施更为强大的社会保障计划。     

全球金融机构重新排名

始于去年爆发的次贷危机已经给全球金融机构带来了重大的影响,此危机尚还未结束,仍然像幽灵一样纠缠着全球的金融机构     

对冲基金如何影响全球金融市场

"对冲"一词原本指的是一种风险管理方式,而对冲基金的"对冲"则是指这些基金在不同市场或不同证券之间的高卖低买的套利行为。虽然对冲基金的高频套利活动具有增强市场弹性的一面,但其固有的高风险特性难以改变,加之松散的国际监管环境,对冲基金的风险聚合力难以估量。     

The impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war on global financial markets

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded the Ukraine. In this paper, we analyze the response of European and global stock markets alongside a representative sample of commodities. We compare the war response against the recent Covid-19 pandemic and the not-too-distant 2008 global financial crisis. Applying a Markov-switching HAR model on volatility proxies, estimates are made of synchronization, duration and intensity measures for each event. In broad terms, stock markets and commodities respond most rapidly to the Russian invasion; and post-invasion crisis intensity is noticeably smaller compared to both the Covid-19 and the GFC. Wheat and nickel are the most affected commodities due to the prominent exporter status of the two countries.     

世行将2009年中国GDP增长预测下调至6.5％

世界银行发布的最新《中国经济季报》认为，尽管受到全球经济危机的的严重冲击，中国的实体经济仍保持平稳较快的发展。     

The global financial crisis and integration in European retail banking

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to investigate the integration process within the European Union retail banking sector by analysing deposit and lending rates to the household sector during the period 2003–2011. Secondly, to assess the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis on the banking integration process, an area that is yet unexplored. An important contribution of the paper is the application of the recently developed Phillips and Sul (2007a) panel convergence methodology which has not hitherto been employed in this area. This method analyses the degree as well as the speed of convergence, identifies the presence of club formation, and measures the behaviour of each country’s transition path relative to the panel average. The empirical results point to the presence of convergence in all deposit and lending rates to the household sector up to 2007. In sharp contrast, the null of convergence is rejected in all deposit and credit markets after the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. These results show that the global crisis has had a detrimental effect on the banking integration process. We find some convergence in a few sub-clusters of countries but the rate of convergence is typically slow and several countries are identified as diverging altogether. In addition, we find that the credit market, in general, is far more heterogeneous than the savings market.     

A quality-based global assessment of financial research

We conduct rankings on finance programs based on a rich database of citations for all articles from a set of 23 quality finance journals during 1990–2010. Our work represents a new perspective on the evaluation of faculty research as compared to the traditional counting of total number of publications in the literature. Our findings show that the top-five institutions are the University of Chicago, Harvard University, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University. In general, the top programs are able to produce a large number of high impact articles and a majority of their citations are drawn from premier finance journals. In addition, European and Asia–Pacific institutions are doing very well during the recent years. Our author assessment suggests that for an author with at least five normalized citations per year from articles that appeared in the 23 finance journals, she will be in the top 1.7 % of all authors.     

The cooperative bank difference before and after the global financial crisis

We compare characteristics of the banks' specialization (cooperative versus non-cooperative) at the world level in a time spell including the global financial crisis. Cooperative banks display higher net loans/total assets ratios, lower shares of derivatives over total assets and lower earning volatility than commercial banks. With a diff-in-diff approach we test whether the global financial crisis produced convergence/divergence in these indicators. We finally document that, in a conditional convergence specification, the net loans/total assets ratio is positively and significantly correlated with value added growth in some manufacturing sectors but not in others.     

The global institutionalization of financial reporting: The case of the United Arab Emirates

Almost 100 countries have agreed to adopt or work towards convergence with the International Accounting Standards Board's international financial reporting standards (IFRS). Applying an institutional theory framework at a nation state level, and using publicly available data about the emerging economy of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a case, this paper identifies some of the global coercive, normative and mimetic pressures which have contributed to this widespread adoption. The challenge for emerging economies such as that of the UAE is whether the reality of IFRS implementation can match the image of IFRS adoption.     

Long-term financial performance of corporate social responsibility

We conduct an empirical investigation of the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and long-term stock performance in Japan. This study is set in the Japanese context. We find, first, that CSR activities are positively related to long-term stock returns. Second, shareholders and financial institutions that have long-term investments with strong governance promote CSR activities. Third, discussion with stakeholders, such as loyal well-socialized consumers in developed countries, supports firms' CSR activities, especially environmental issues in Europe and governance in North America. Finally, short-term CSR investment does not yield good stock performance. By applying robust methodology to over 10 years of data, our study supports the hypothesis that investors in the Japanese market are significantly concerned about the social activities of firms, and that these concerns are reflected in the markets. This study provides quantitative evidence of the positive effect that CSR has on long-term stock investments in the Japanese market. In addition, it concludes that CSR has the potential to be a tool to moderate myopic short-termism.     

The benefits of geographical and product expansion in the financial service industry

Residual analysis techniques are used to evaluate acquiring firm shareholder perceptions of the benefits of product expansion by nonbanking firms into the banking industry and of the relaxation of restrictions on interstate banking. The results are consistent with other merger studies that fail to find significant returns to shareholders of acquiring firms and suggest either that such benefits do not exist or they are distributed to the shareholders of the acquired firm.Finance Department, University of KentuckySchool of Business, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill     

Comparison of sales performance across financial service sectors

In the new world of financial services, comparisons are going to have to be made on the productivity and performance of the various sales representatives within the industry: stockbrokers, bank sales representatives, financial planners and insurance agents and brokers. This paper discusses the problems involved in making cross-sector comparisons and proposes a way to compare the production of sales representatives who sell equity products with sales representatives who sell risk products. Comparisons are also presented for sales rep earnings and turnover.     

The global audit profession and the international financial architecture: Understanding regulatory relationships at a time of financial crisis

This paper explores how regulatory relationships in the global audit arena are being affected by the current financial crisis. Key policy initiatives and debates are analyzed, along with institutional interactions, in particular between the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), international regulators and the large audit firms. The events are placed in the context of the new international financial architecture which has developed over the last decade. Using the illustrative lens of bank auditing, questions are asked of the nature and status of audit practice and the regulatory arrangements governing such practice. The paper shows the active nature of the regulatory responses to the crisis and the shifting and competing influences among key regulatory and professional participants in the global audit arena. Emphasis is placed on the need for audit researchers to be sensitive to the developing global financial architecture, and its potential implications for the study of audit practice in different national and international contexts.     

欠发达地区农村金融服务的创新之路

农村金融在市场资源配置中起着关键性的作用,发展农业农村经济、增加农民收入离不开农村金融提供连续持久的支持和优质的服务。2010年中央一号文件《中共中央国务院关于加大统筹城乡发展力度进一步夯实农业农村发展基础的若干意见》指出,要提高农村金融服务质量和水平,针对农业农村特点,创新金融产品和服务方式。在建设社会主义新农村的新形势下,