Nonbanks and risk in retail payments

This paper documents the importance of nonbanks in retail payments in the United States and in 15 European countries and analyzes the implications of the importance and multiple roles played by nonbanks on retail payment risks. This paper also reviews the main regulatory safeguards in place, and concludes that there may be a need to reconsider some of them in view of the growing role of nonbanks and of the global reach of risks in the electronic era.

Ideas for a regulatory definition of FinTech

Purpose: The aim of the paper is to develop the approach to a legal definition of FinTech. Design/Methodology/Approach: In this paper we evolve possible approaches of FinTech legal definition, investigate existing approaches at the international level and examine the policies applied at the national levels. Document analysis, as a form of qualitative research, was used in this study. Findings: We found that in most countries the legislation does not specifically address fintech companies, and the legal framework equally regulates the activities of traditional service providers and fintech operators. In our opinion, no specific legislation for FinTech companies needed, each type of activity provided by a financial or technology company is subject to a specific legislation/regulation with primary focus on services and products provided as payments, insurance, investments etc. Practical Implications: The term FinTech is freely used by policy makers, regulators, companies, researchers, academics and the public, both nationally and internationally. According to international organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD, FinTech offers the opportunity to accelerate economic growth and expand financial affordability/inclusion in all countries. Some countries are increasingly striving to become global or international regional hubs for FinTech and are working hard to develop interagency government strategies with a supportive legal environment. Originality/Value: There is still confusion about the nature and dynamics of FinTech among politicians, scientists and practitioners, as well as about the legal framework of this area. The value of this article is to clarify and propose an apprach to definition of FinTech by combining different approaches in a very original and innovative way.peer-reviewe

Assessment of Today’s Mobile Banking Applications from the View of Customer Requirements

Mobile banking is a subset of electronic banking which underlies not only the determinants of the banking business but also the special conditions of mobile commerce. This paper analyzes customer needs and expectations from the mobile applications’ view and from the banking view in order to derive a defined set of requirements. Based on these results, existing mobile banking applications are assessed. Their major shortcomings are explained, opportunities for their improvement are shown and the impact of upcoming new technology is discussed. The outcome of the paper is a defined set of customer requirements to mobile banking applications, the identification and assessment of four standard types of current mobile banking applications and an explanation of major failure reasons along with opportunities for their improvement.

Digital news report: Australia 2015

This report gives a clear picture of how the Australian news consumer compares to eleven other countries surveyed in 2015: Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Spain, UK, USA and urban Brazil. The Digital News Report: Australia is part of a global survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Further in-depth analysis of Australian digital news consumption has been conducted and published by the News & Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra

OSCAR: A Collaborative Bandwidth Aggregation System

The exponential increase in mobile data demand, coupled with growing user expectation to be connected in all places at all times, have introduced novel challenges for researchers to address. Fortunately, the wide spread deployment of various network technologies and the increased adoption of multi-interface enabled devices have enabled researchers to develop solutions for those challenges. Such solutions aim to exploit available interfaces on such devices in both solitary and collaborative forms. These solutions, however, have faced a steep deployment barrier. In this paper, we present OSCAR, a multi-objective, incentive-based, collaborative, and deployable bandwidth aggregation system. We present the OSCAR architecture that does not introduce any intermediate hardware nor require changes to current applications or legacy servers. The OSCAR architecture is designed to automatically estimate the system's context, dynamically schedule various connections and/or packets to different interfaces, be backwards compatible with the current Internet architecture, and provide the user with incentives for collaboration. We also formulate the OSCAR scheduler as a multi-objective, multi-modal scheduler that maximizes system throughput while minimizing energy consumption or financial cost. We evaluate OSCAR via implementation on Linux, as well as via simulation, and compare our results to the current optimal achievable throughput, cost, and energy consumption. Our evaluation shows that, in the throughput maximization mode, we provide up to 150% enhancement in throughput compared to current operating systems, without any changes to legacy servers. Moreover, this performance gain further increases with the availability of connection resume-supporting, or OSCAR-enabled servers, reaching the maximum achievable upper-bound throughput