This paper studies the relationship between the level of economic development and the incidence of three forms of payments across countries, namely the incidence of bank accounts, digital payments, and mobile money accounts among the adult populations across countries. It presents simple...

Banking, derivatives, and structured finance may attract the lion's share of accolades and approbation in global finance—but payment systems are where the money is. Historically, payment systems in most jurisdictions have been legally and operationally intertwined with the conventional banking...

In a short period of time virtual currencies have gained significant traction and become an economic reality, with Bitcoin being the most dominant among over 500 virtual currencies. Bitcoin and other virtual currencies present a particularly difficult and unique jurisdictional challenge to...

This article employs a credit risk framework, calibrated using survey data collected by the Bank of England, to analyse the potential credit risk to settlement banks arising from the tiered structure of the large-value payment systems in the United Kingdom. The results suggest that the direct...

In recent years mobile devices have been increasingly used for the transmission of data, including the initiation and receipt of payments. Payments executed include "international remittance transfers" ("IRTs"), which are cross-border, person-to-person payments of a relatively low value. An IRT...

This paper uses transaction-level data from a large discount chain together with zip-code-level explanatory variables to learn about consumer payment choices across size of transaction, location, and time. With three years of data from thousands of stores across the country, we identify...

In this paper, we gather together the minimum units of Bitcoin identity (the individual addresses), and group them into approximations of business entities, what we call “super clusters”. While these clusters can remain largely anonymous, we are able to ascribe many of them to particular...

SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) provides a network for financial institutions to send and receive information about financial transactions in the form of secure standardized messages. Here we analyze the global network created by flows of a particular type of...