Topic Review
Virtual Currency
Virtual currency, or virtual money, is a type of unregulated, digital money, which is issued and usually controlled by its developers and used and accepted among the members of a specific virtual community. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has warned investors against pump and dump schemes that use virtual currencies. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the US Treasury, defined virtual currency in its guidance published in 2013. In 2014, the European Banking Authority defined virtual currency as "a digital representation of value that is neither issued by a central bank or a public authority, nor necessarily attached to a fiat currency, but is accepted by natural or legal persons as a means of payment and can be transferred, stored or traded electronically". By contrast, a digital currency that is issued by a central bank is defined as "central bank digital currency".
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  • 20 Oct 2022
Topic Review
VocaLink
Vocalink is a payment systems company headquartered in the United Kingdom , created in 2007 from the merger between Voca and LINK. It designs, builds and operates the UK payments infrastructure, which underpins the provision of the Bacs payment system, the Direct Debit system, the UK ATM LINK switching platform covering 65,000 ATMs and the UK Faster Payments systems. Vocalink processes over 90% of UK salaries, more than 70% of household bills and 98% of state benefits. In 2013 the company processed over 10.5 billion UK payments with a value of over £5 trillion. In July 2016 MasterCard purchased a 92% stake in the company, with the remainder to be held by UK banks for a period of three years.
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  • 20 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Electronic Ticket
An electronic ticket (commonly abbreviated as e-ticket) is the digital ticket equivalent of a paper ticket. The term is most commonly associated with airline issued tickets. Electronic ticketing for urban or rail public transport is usually referred to as travel card or transit pass. It is also used in ticketing in the entertainment industry. An electronic ticket system is a more efficient method of ticket entry, processing and marketing for companies in the airline, railways and other transport and entertainment industries.
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  • 20 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (ETH or Ξ) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, Ether is second only to Bitcoin in market capitalization. Ethereum was conceived in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin. Additional founders of Ethereum included Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio and Joseph Lubin. In 2014, development work began and was crowdfunded, and the network went live on 30 July 2015. Ethereum allows anyone to deploy permanent and immutable decentralized applications onto it, with which users can interact. Decentralized finance (DeFi) applications provide a broad array of financial services without the need for typical financial intermediaries like brokerages, exchanges, or banks, such as allowing cryptocurrency users to borrow against their holdings or lend them out for interest. Ethereum also allows users to create and exchange NFTs, which are unique tokens representing ownership of an associated asset or privilege, as recognized by any number of institutions. Additionally, many other cryptocurrencies utilize the ERC-20 token standard on top of the Ethereum blockchain and have utilized the platform for initial coin offerings. A series of upgrades called Ethereum 2.0 includes a transition to proof of stake and aims to increase transaction throughput by using sharding.
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  • 20 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Investment Management
Investment management is the professional asset management of various securities (shares, bonds and other securities) and other assets (e.g., real estate) in order to meet specified investment goals for the benefit of the investors. Investors may be institutions (insurance companies, pension funds, corporations, charities, educational establishments etc.) or private investors (both directly via investment contracts and more commonly via collective investment schemes e.g. mutual funds or exchange-traded funds). The term asset management is often used to refer to the investment management of collective investments, while the more generic fund management may refer to all forms of institutional investment as well as investment management for private investors. Investment managers who specialize in advisory or discretionary management on behalf of (normally wealthy) private investors may often refer to their services as money management or portfolio management often within the context of "private banking". The provision of investment management services includes elements of financial statement analysis, asset selection, stock selection, plan implementation and ongoing monitoring of investments. Coming under the remit of financial services many of the world's largest companies are at least in part investment managers and employ millions of staff. It remains unclear if professional investment managers can reliably enhance risk adjusted returns by an amount that exceeds fees and expenses of investment management. The term fund manager (or investment advisor in the United States) refers to both a firm that provides investment management services and an individual who directs fund management decisions. According to a Boston Consulting Group study, the assets managed professionally for fees reached an all-time high of US$62.4 trillion in 2012, after remaining flat-lined since 2007. Furthermore, these industry assets under management were expected to reach US$70.2 trillion at the end of 2013 as per a Cerulli Associates estimate. The global investment management industry is highly concentrated in nature, in a universe of about 70,000 funds roughly 99.7% of the US fund flows in 2012 went into just 185 funds. Additionally, a majority of fund managers report that more than 50% of their inflows go to only three funds.
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  • 19 Oct 2022
Topic Review
NASDAQ-100
The NASDAQ-100 (^NDX) is a stock market index made up of 103 equity securities issued by 100 of the largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq stock market. It is a modified capitalization-weighted index. The stocks' weights in the index are based on their market capitalizations, with certain rules capping the influence of the largest components. It is based on exchange, and it does not have any financial companies. The financial companies were put in a separate index, the NASDAQ Financial-100.
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  • 19 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Stock-Flow Consistent Model
Stock-Flow Consistent (SFC) models are a family of macroeconomic models based on a rigorous accounting framework, which guarantees a correct and comprehensive integration of all the flows and the stocks of an economy. These models were first developed in the mid-20th century but have recently become popular, particularly within the post-Keynesian school of thought.
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  • 19 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Profit Model
The profit model is the linear, deterministic algebraic model used implicitly by most cost accountants. Starting with, profit equals sales minus costs, it provides a structure for modeling cost elements such as materials, losses, multi-products, learning, depreciation etc. It provides a mutable conceptual base for spreadsheet modelers. This enables them to run deterministic simulations or 'what if' modelling to see the impact of price, cost or quantity changes on profitability.
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  • 19 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Herfindahl Index
The Herfindahl index (also known as Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, HHI, or sometimes HHI-score) is a measure of the size of firms in relation to the industry and an indicator of the amount of competition among them. Named after economists Orris C. Herfindahl and Albert O. Hirschman, it is an economic concept widely applied in competition law, antitrust and also technology management. It is defined as the sum of the squares of the market shares of the firms within the industry (sometimes limited to the 50 largest firms), where the market shares are expressed as fractions. The result is proportional to the average market share, weighted by market share. As such, it can range from 0 to 1.0, moving from a huge number of very small firms to a single monopolistic producer. Increases in the Herfindahl index generally indicate a decrease in competition and an increase of market power, whereas decreases indicate the opposite. Alternatively, if whole percentages are used, the index ranges from 0 to 10,000 "points". For example, an index of .25 is the same as 2,500 points. The major benefit of the Herfindahl index in relationship to such measures as the concentration ratio is that it gives more weight to larger firms. The measure is essentially equivalent to the Simpson diversity index, which is a diversity index used in ecology; the inverse participation ratio (IPR) in physics; and the effective number of parties index in politics.
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  • 19 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Resilience (Organizational)
Organizational resilience is defined as "the ability of a system to withstand changes in its environment and still function". It is a capability that involves organizations either being able to endure the environmental changes without having to permanently adapt, or the organization is forced to adapt a new way of working that better suits the new environmental conditions. In recent years, a new consensus of the concept of resilience emerged as a practical response to the decreasing lifespan of organisations and from the key stakeholders, including boards, governments, regulators, shareholders, staff, suppliers and customers to effectively address the issues of security, preparedness, risk, and survivability. An organization that realizes the benefits of the above definitions of resilience will have a high likelihood of maintaining a successful and thriving enterprise. Previously, it was considered that 'organisational resilience' could only be generated from processes and functions such as Risk Management, Business Continuity, IT Disaster Recovery, Crisis Management, Information Security, Operational continuity, Physical Security and so on. These are recognised as key contributors to operational resilience, and “the positive ability of a system or company to adapt itself to the consequences of a catastrophic failure caused by power outage, a fire, a bomb or similar” event or as "the ability of a [system] to cope with change". However, research from many academics including as Hamel & Valikangas in the Harvard Business Review, Boin, Comfort & Demchak and research facility ResOrgs has influenced understanding and lead to new viewpoints on resilience, including that from the BSI Group, being developed by ISO, the Australian government, ResOrgs, ICSA, and professional services firms such as PwC, all of which recognises that processes and functions are but one element of an organisation's resilience web.
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