The extensive use of financial technologies and innovations in the provision and utilization of financial products and services causes new risks that require constant attention. The article aims to improve innovation risk management methods to increase the operational stability of financial institutions in Ukraine. By generalizing international practice, the types of innovation risks are classified, and their impact on the activities of financial institutions and consumers is characterized. The attention is drawn to the control strengthening over the impact of operational and regulatory risks, based on important theoretical provisions contained in WBG, BIS, BCBS, and FSB documents. An organizational scheme for the interaction of a financial institution and an IT company is proposed to conclude “smart contracts” based on the use of a cloud service and blockchain technology. The authors propose additional methods of insurance protection and compensation for losses caused by the implementation of risks of using ICT and innovation based on creating the Collective Risk Insurance Fund of financial institutions; offer approaches to the calculation of variable and fixed parts of the contribution to the insurance fund for certain groups of financial institutions. It is concluded that to maintain the proper operational stability of financial institutions in Ukraine, it is necessary to introduce additional collective compensation methods for the risks of innovation and the strengthening of cyber threats.
Quantum leaps in technology affect all phases of business models over numerous industries and are the fundamental characteristic of any technological revolution. Emerging technologies provide new avenues for industries to increase their competitive advantage and enhance the economic progression. The aim of this study is to advance a theoretical model on motivating antecedents and consequences of blockchain technology in insurance industry based on the evidence from past literature. This chapter is approached from the theoretical viewpoint, so it meticulously assesses and examines the prior literature to debate on the role of blockchain technology in the insurance industry. The outcome of the present study is dispassionate and corresponding to the conclusions of the prior literature. Blockchain helps in achieving innovation, augmenting transparency, refining data standards, and advancing an integrated approach for quality service. Thus, the espousal of blockchain in insurance is developing very quickly, and it has become the default platform for the complete insurance industry.
Real-time financial settlements constrain traders to have the cash on hand before they can enter a trade [Khapko and Zoican, 2017]. This prevents short-selling and ultimately impedes liquidity. We propose a novel trading protocol which relaxes the cash constraint, and manages chains of deferred payments. Traders can buy without paying first, and can re-sell while still withholding payments. Trades naturally arrange in chains which contract when deals are closed and extend when new ones open. Default risk is handled by reversing trades. In this short note we propose a class of novel financial instruments for zero-risk and zero-collateral intermediation. The central idea is that bilateral trades can be chained into trade lines. The ownership of an underlying asset becomes distributed among traders with positions in the trade line. The trading protocol determines who ends up owning that asset and the overall payoffs of the participants. Counterparty risk is avoided because the asset itself serves as a collateral for the entire chain of trades. The protocol can be readily implemented as a smart contract on a blockchain. Additional examples, proofs, protocol variants, and game-theoretic properties related to the order-sensitivity of the games defined by trade lines can be found in the extended version of this note [Danos et al., 2019]. Therein, one can also find the definition and game-theoretic analysis of standard trade-lines with applications to trust-less zero-collateral intermediation.
How might modern settlement systems with distributed ledger technology achieve zero settlement risk? We consider the design of settlement systems that satisfies two integral features: information-leakage proof and zero settlement risk. Legacy settlement systems partition private information but are vulnerable to settlement fails. A token system with dynamic ownership representation, or a dynamic ledger, can be designed to achieve both, as long as it employs a protocol that enforces two restrictions: programs must be immediately implemented and must involve transactions based on verifiable claims. We show how such a system can support various arrangements, including insurance, derivatives, collateralized loans, and securitization.
With the rapid development of contemporary technology, people are not only satisfied with the economic benefits brought by the traditional financial industry. In 2009, a currency incorporating blockchain Bitcoin was born, thus kicking off the cryptocurrency trend. In this paper, the historical development and status of the cryptocurrency market will be discussed first, including an introduction to the cryptocurrency market as a whole and a detailed description of the major currencies. Secondly, it discusses the various cryptocurrency disruptions in the year 2021, with musk as the key opinion leading the cryptocurrency price trends. Then, it analyzes the factors that affect the value of cryptocurrencies, including supply and demand, public perception and relationship with other currencies, and the value of cryptocurrency investments and future price trends. The regulation of cryptocurrencies is also reviewed. Policies from different countries is firstly discussed, and following this article talks about the impact of different regulation policies on the cryptocurrency market. The prediction for the future regulation tendency is also included. In addition, this study focuses on the case of the Republic of El Salvador's adoption of bitcoin as legal tender, feasibility, risks, and advantages and disadvantages of bitcoin as legal tender.
Hedge strategies are used with different terms to evaluate whether the co-movement between the U.S. stock market and Bitcoin can be used to optimize the portfolio. As for the representative stock indexes, we construct long-term and short-term hedge portfolios of the S&P 500 and NASDAQ with Bitcoin based on the least variance hedging view. It turns out that long-term hedges are less effective than short-term hedges. To further test the correctness of the conclusion, in the context of the recently enacted and implemented double-reduction policy, we take the market value as the weight, select 5 stocks with large market value to build a portfolio, and hedge them with Bitcoin for a week. The conclusion was still in line with our expectations. By testing the feasibility of hedge between U.S. equity and Bitcoin, this research can provide investors with effective investment ideas and reveal the essence of hedge: the assets of the two hedges should have similar volatility.
O escopo central do presente estudo consiste em investigar algumas perspectivas (e os correlatos riscos e dificuldades) de incorporação da inteligência artificial e dos smart contracts para a regulação convencional do risco contratual. Tal empreitada parte da investigação das perspectivas de a gestão do risco contratual por intermédio da inteligência artificial ocorrer, entre outras manifestações, ora pela sua utilização para a delimitação inicial de elementos das prestações a cargo das partes, ora para a revisão das suas prestações diante de superveniências contratuais. Analisam-se, por fim, algumas repercussões dos smart contracts sobre a execução contratual e, em especial, sobre a atuação dos remédios ao inadimplemento. Para tanto, o presente estudo adota o método lógico-dedutivo, a partir do exame bibliográfico da doutrina nacional e, a título ilustrativo, da doutrina estrangeira.
Marcelo Corrales Compagnucci, Mark Fenwick, Stefan Wrbka
In the context of the exponential growth of new technologies, any attempt to think about the future becomes enormously challenging. The conventional modern hope that we might learn from past experience and, by doing so, anticipate or otherwise predict future trends has faded due to the cognitive and normative uncertainties that surround today’s technology. As such, ‘prediction’ becomes much harder in an era of fast-paced, technology-driven economic, social and cultural changes. Things move so quickly, often in unknowable directions, leaving us incapable of even grasping the present, let alone identifying a trajectory that can form the basis for any reliable predictions about where we might be going. In thinking about an indeterminate present and undecidable future, we need to combine imagination (everyone is now in the business of science fiction) with the realisation that our predictions are very likely to be proven wrong....
The salience theory of choice under risk shows that investor behavior drives cross-sectional cryptocurrency returns. Investors place too much weight on salient payouts, causing overvaluation of cryptocurrencies with upward salience returns and undervaluation of those with downward salience returns, leading to negative expected returns for the former and positive expected returns for the latter. The salience effect in the cryptocurrency market is more pronounced than in equity markets, making it a significant risk factor for explaining other cross-sectional returns in the cryptocurrency market. Unlike other documented return predictors, the salience theory uniquely contributes to understanding the cryptocurrency market. Video Abstract: https://youtu.be/F8BxhDWW7b4.
Emmanuel Kingsford Owusu, Albert P.C. Chan, Gabriel Nani, Daniel Y. Agymang
Research into smart contracts (SC) over the past decade has increased substantially, with colossal efforts stemming from the computer science and engineering domains. As SC remains a relatively new research paradigm for many areas, efforts from the construction management (CM) field has not been noted yet. This study examines the SC research trend right from the publication on the subject matter until 2018. It focuses on the longitudinal examination of SC research in terms of subject area concentration, and countries, contributions towards SC research and the key sources of SC research. The study also attempts to investigate the efforts made by construction management researchers towards the exploration and application of SC in construction management processes. A comprehensive bibliometric search of SC documents generated a search result of 1,002 publications. A total of 182 publications were examined since only peer-reviewed journal papers were considered for this review study. 2018 recorded the highest number of publications (over 400% increase of the previous year, 2017). China, the U.S., and the U.K. have been the leading countries contributing immensely towards SC research. Despite the tremendous efforts over the past decade of SC research, the results show a significant lack of interdisciplinary collaborations among researchers. Moreover, a huge gap of SC research in construction/project management-related domains was identified, revealing the need for critical explorations on SC research and the applicability of SC during the planning, procuring, executing, and managing construction project-related processes. This study is, therefore, intended to incite a deeper engagement in SC research from construction management (CM) researchers, identifying the benefits and challenges of the application of SC systems in CM processes. Thus, contributing to a deepened understanding of SC in CM.
This chapter sets out the elements of the model proposed in practical detail, explaining how it is envisaged the market would operate in practice. It covers infrastructure of the market; rules for the operation of the distributed ledger; operational mechanisms that will be required, being a mechanism for valuing differences in mitigation value of units from participating jurisdictions and a mechanism to effect transactions; the transactional rules that form part of the regulatory framework; and the participants, on a jurisdictional, cross-jurisdictional and supra-jurisdictional basis.
Abstract How should the doctrine of unilateral mistake apply when a programming error results in a buyer's algorithmic trading programme accepting an offer generated by the seller's trading programme to exchange cryptocurrencies at 250 times the current market rate? How should the knowledge element be adapted given that algorithmic trading necessarily means that the traders’ minds were not engaged at the moment the contract was formed? These novel issues came before the Singapore Court of Appeal in Quoine Pte Ltd v B2C2 Ltd . The decision further cautions customers of cryptocurrency exchanges not to assume that they have property rights in the cryptocurrencies held by the exchange and to examine carefully the nature of asset holding arrangement found in the documentation.
ABSTRACT: We study the ability of hedge funds to restructure target firms. A purchase of at least 3% of a target firm’s stake is subject to a 13D SEC Filing in the US. We use these filings to investigate the impact of such transactions in the period 2009–2020. Our method of choice is the event study approach. We set the event on the date of the transaction and compute cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) within a specified event window. Based on accounting metrics, such as return on equity and return on assets, we study how restructuring impacts target company’s capital structure. Based on SEC Section 13G filings, we are further able to distinguish between acquisitions with active and passive aims. We find that firms targeted for active purposes achieve higher abnormal returns and overall higher performance. We further look on the impact of the overall stock-market cycle on abnormal returns. We find that the level of abnormal returns for actively targeted companies remains higher with no regard to the market cycle. Based on these findings, we draw conclusions on the overall impact of hedge fund activism. KEY WORDS: Hedge funds, Shareholder Activism, Abnormal Returns, Event study, Restructuring
Insurance is a big financial market with a high-risk high-gain margin. But the insurance system existing in the current scenario has a lot of dependencies both on the Insurance provider as well as the consumer. With its distributed ledger, smart contracts, and non-repudiation capabilities, blockchain is revolutionizing the way financial organizations do business, and the insurance industry is no exception. Through blockchain this system can be optimized to reduce costs and the middlemen dependency involved, by managing information in a smarter way. The main idea is to establish a peer to peer system of consensus for claiming insurance without the hassle of involving insurance surveyors or other non-involved parties.
Technologists have argued that cryptocurrencies and blockchains will revolutionize our lives. Many have suggested that blockchain is the single biggest technological innovation since the internet itself. It will “democratize finance” and “disintermediate big tech” among other societal improvements. Yet adoption of blockchain has been underwhelming, and it has largely failed to live up to these lofty expectations. One significant reason for this is that the digital assets that underpin blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ether are often not secure, as the industry has been rife with hacks and scams. The emerging market for Digital Asset Insurance may provide the necessary backstop to make the asset safe enough for broader adoption. This article provides an overview of the relevant technology, outlines the state of the digital asset insurance industry, and discusses how the insurance integral to the broader blockchain ecosystem.
Climate insurance is already a hot topic due to the increased number of climate-related catastrophic events accompanied by associated losses for the economy in general and insurance companies, in particular. The extremely hot and dry summer of 2018 in some European countries highlighted existing weaknesses of the agricultural insurance mechanisms in Europe, where the farmers had to wait for months before compensation payments could bemade. Our paper aims to compare features of the yield-based insurance2and the index-based insurance (IBI)3in agriculture in the light of new developments and trends in information technologies (IT). The results show that an application of the distributed ledger technologies (DLT) in combination with IBI could not only resolve existing problems, but also facilitate development of the innovative insurance mechanisms at the EU level –providing effective protection against climate-related risks and preventing a systemic risk escalation
Security of payment (SOP) issues still persist in the construction industry despite numerous investigations and incremental reforms. Various solutions and policies have been proposed and analysed in-depth in previous studies. However, limited studies have focused on the integration of advanced technologies to address SOP issues. The aim of this research is to develop a comprehensive framework that integrates practical advanced technologies to address SOP issues in the construction industry. A concurrent mixed-method design was adopted to (a) identify the industry's perspective on what advanced technologies can be accepted to address SOP issues through a questionnaire survey, and (b) identify the use of advanced technologies through a live construction project as a case study. Subsequently, a data flow diagram framework was developed to articulate the whole process flow of how the system delivers automatic payments to subcontractors upon the completion of their contractual obligations and work done. This research contributes new and practical insights into the application and integration of smart sensors, oracles, BIM, blockchain technology and smart contracts in addressing SOP issues in the construction industry.