With the spectre of the Euro crisis looming substantially large and scaring potential monetary unions, this study is a short-run trip to embryonic African monetary zones to assess the Schumpeterian thesis for positive spillovers of financial services on growth. Causality analysis is performed...

In recent years, there have been rapid technological innovations in retail payments. Such dramatic changes in the economics of payment systems have led to questions regarding whether there is consumer demand for cash. The entry of these new products and services has resulted in significant...

Current research on cloud computing often focuses on the technology itself and the benefits that one company can use and choose from cloud services. Most of the research has focused on mainstream enterprises and limited regard to Central Banks' (CBs') Cloud Computing Adoption (CCA). CBs are...

Exchanges and other trading platforms are often vertically integrated to carry out trading, clearing and settlement as one operation. We show that such vertical silos can prevent efficiency gains from horizontal consolidation of trading and settlement platforms to be realized. Independent of the...

The competition between a central securities depository (CSD) and a custodian bank is analysed in a Stackelberg model. The CSD sets its prices first, the custodian bank follows. There are many investor banks each of which has to decide whether to use the service of the CSD or of the custodian...

This paper compares securities settlement gross and netting architectures. It studies settlement risk arising from exogenous operational delays and compares settlement failures between the two architectures as functions of the length of the settlement interval under different market conditions....

This paper investigates the impact on the network growth of the level of merchant discount, the level of Multilateral Interchange Fee (MIF), and the consumers' and the merchants' awareness of positive network effects. In an artificial market, in which issuers and acquirers belong to the same...