The ongoing economic and financial digitalization is making individual data a key input and source of value for companies across sectors, from bigtechs and pharmaceuticals to manufacturers and financial services providers. Data on human behavior and choices—our “likes,” purchase patterns, locations, social activities, biometrics, and financing choices—are being generated, collected, stored, and processed at an unprecedented scale.
This book focuses on our increasing dependence upon Big Tech to live, manage, and enjoy our lives. The author examines how we freely exchange our personal data for access to online platforms, services, and devices without proper consideration of the implications of this trade. Our personal data is the defining resource of the emerging digital economy, and it is increasingly concentrated in a few data enclaves controlled by Big Tech firms, cementing an increasingly parasitic form of technoscientific innovation. Big Tech controls access to these data, dictates the terms of our use of their services and products, and controls the future development of key technologies like artificial intelligence. The contention of this book is that we need to rethink our political and policy approach to data governance and to do so requires unpacking the peculiarities of personal data and how personal data are transformed into a valuable asset.
Data are generated wherever digital technologies are deployed namely, in almost every part of modern life. Using these data can empower individuals, drive innovation, enable new digital products and improve policy making and public service delivery.
The digital transformation of finance and banking enables traditional services to be delivered in a more effective and efficient way but, at the same time, presents crucial issues such as fast-growing new asset classes, new currencies, datafication and data privacy, algorithmization of law and regulation and, last but not least, new models of financial crime. This book approaches the evolution of digital finance from a business perspective and in a holistic way, providing cutting-edge knowledge of how the digital financial system works in its three main domains: banking, insurance and capital markets. It offers a bird’s-eye view of the major issues and developments in these individual sectors. The book begins by examining the wider framework of the subsequent analysis and over the next three parts, discusses the opportunities, risks and challenges facing the digitalization of these individual financial subsectors, highlighting the similarities and differences in their digitalization agenda, as well as the existing linkages and dependencies among them. The book clarifies the strategic issues facing the development of digital finance in these major subsectors over the coming years. The book has three key messages: that digital transformation changes fundamentally the way financial businesses operate; that individual trades have their own digitalization agenda; and that the state with its regulatory power and central banking and money has a particularly important role to play. It will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of finance andbanking, as well as policymakers wishing to understand the values and limitations of new forms of digital money.
"The first data and statistics strategy for the Fund comes at a critical time. A fast-changing data landscape, new data needs for evolving surveillance priorities, and persisting data weaknesses across the membership pose challenges and opportunities for the Fund and its members. The challenges emerging from the digital revolution include an unprecedented amount of new data and measurement questions on growth, productivity, inflation, and welfare. Newly available granular and high-frequency (big) data offer the potential for more timely detection of vulnerabilities. In the wake of the crisis, Fund surveillance requires greater cross-country data comparability; staff and authorities face the complexity of integrating new data sources and closing data gaps, while working to address the weaknesses noted by the IEO Report (Behind the Scenes with Data at the IMF) in 2016. The overarching strategy is to move toward an ecosystem of data and statistics that enables the Fund and its members to better meet the evolving data needs in a digital world. It integrates Fund-wide work streams on data provision to the Fund for surveillance purposes, international statistical standards, capacity development, and data management under a common institutional objective. It seeks seamless access and sharing of data within the Fund, enabling cloud-based data dissemination to support data provision by member countries (e.g., the “global data commons”), closing data gaps with new sources including Big Data, and improving assessments of data adequacy for surveillance to help better prioritize capacity development. The Fund also will work with policymakers to understand the implications of the digital economy and digital data for the macroeconomic statistics, including new measures of welfare beyond GDP."
"The internet was supposed to end sovereignty. "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, you have no sovereignty where we gather," John Perry Barlow famously declared. Sovereignty would prove impossible over a world of bits, with the internet simply routing around futile controls. But reports of the death of sovereignty over the internet proved premature. Consider recent events"--
This book offers an in-depth analysis of the most salient features of contemporary financial systems and clarifies the major strategic issues facing the development of digital finance. It provides insight into how the digital finance system actually works in a socioeconomic context. It presents three key messages: that digital transformation will change the financial system entirely, that the State has a particularly important role to play in the whole process and that consumers will be offered more opportunities and freedom but simultaneously will be exposed to more risk and challenges. The book is divided into four parts. It begins by laying down the fundamentals of the subsequent analysis and offers a deep understanding of digital finance, including a topology of the key technologies applied in the transformation process. The next part reviews the challenges facing the digital State in the new reality, the digitalization of public finance and the development of digitally relevant taxation systems. In the third part, digital consumer aspects are discussed. The final part examines the risks and challenges of digital finance. The authors focus their attention on three key developments in financial markets: accelerated growth in terms of the importance of algorithms, replacing existing legal regulations; the expansion of cyber risk and its growing impact and finally the emergence of new dimensions of systemic risk as a side effect of financial digitalization. The authors supplement the analysis with a discussion of how these new risks and challenges are monitored and mitigated by financial supervision. The book is a useful, accessible guide to students and researchers of finance, finance and technology, regulations and compliance in finance.
In the past decade, fintech has shaken up the financial sector in Latin America providing innovations in lending, payments, insurance, and regulation and compliance. This paper examines this development by focusing on both fintech services and regulation. Exploring fintech’s macro-critical impact using country- and bank-level data, we find that booming financial technologies in Latin America have helped boost competition in the banking sector and inclusion. Additionally, we demonstrate that fintech firms in Latin America experienced robust growth even during the pandemic supported by external funding. Finally, we discuss how regulators are addressing the risks associated with financial technologies and how they are leveraging fintech tools in their supervisory activities.
This note offers a framework to help countries navigate, as well as tools to help them manage, the trade-offs between CBDC data use and privacy protection. It addresses retail CBDC, as data access and privacy-preserving considerations in a wholesale environment are similar to those of the traditional RTGS systems. It emphasizes the role of institutional arrangements, data collection, access and storage policies, design choices, and technological solutions. At a given level of preference for privacy, central banks can facilitate better use of CBDC data through robust transparency and accountability arrangements, sound policies, and judicious adoption of privacy-by-design approaches including the use of privacy-enhancing technologies.
