Virtual agents can enhance customer service, reduce operational costs.
In today's on-demand world, a growing number of financial service institutions have realized that customer service representatives and legacy touchtone systems alone simply can't meet their customers' demands for anytime/anywhere access to services. As a result--and thanks to significant improvements in quality and functionality and the emergence...

An analysis of credit scoring for agricultural loans in Thailand.
Abstract: Loan contracts performance determines the profitability and stability of the financial institutions and screening the loan applications is a key process in minimizing credit risk. Before making any credit decisions, credit analysis (the assessment of the financial history and financial backgrounds of the borrowers) should be completed as...

Roundtable - a multiplicity of actors and transnational governance.
The roundtable was convened at 10:45 a.m., Saturday, March 31, by its moderator, Jose Gabilondo of the College of Law, Florida International University, who introduced the discussants: Timothy Canova of Chapman University Law School; Erika George of the University of Utah College of Law; and Robert Wai of Osgoode...

Principles of Islamic banking: debt versus equity financing. (Akacem: principles of Islamic banking).
It is difficult to pinpoint the start of Islamic banking, but the consensus is that it took place in Egypt in the 1960s. (2) The Egyptian experiment did not last very long, and it was not until the mid 1970s before Islamic banking started to take hold in many...

The tenuous relationship between the fight against money laundering and the disruption of criminal finance.
This article examines the fight against money laundering as a case study of the separation between an enforcement system's objectives and performance. To launder money is to hide its illegal origin. The fight against money laundering is supposed to disrupt laundering in its various forms--especially what is done by...

How large is the federal financial safety net?
In the 1980s and early 1990s, U.S. taxpayers paid $130 billion to make good on the federal government's guarantee to protect depositors in thrift institutions (U.S. GAO 1996: 14). The crisis affecting thrifts in the late 1980s exhausted the funds that had been set aside by the deposit insurance...

A new mapping of the world for the new millennium.
PETER J TAYLOR (*) MICHAEL HOYLER (**) DAVID R F WALKER (*) MARK J SZEGNER (*) A new mapping of the world derived from connections between cities is presented as a complement to the traditional world map of countries. Under conditions...

Australia's Money Mandarins: The Reserve Bank and the Politics of Money.
Australia's Money Mandarins: The Reserve Bank and the Politics of Money Stephen Bell Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004 $59.95 In September 1999, The Economist began a survey of the world economy on a cautionary note: 'Central banks are now more powerful than ever before. They should enjoy...

Into 2002: the new year brings new challenges.
Oil revenues, workers' remittances, and the services industry, including tourism, banking and finance, as well as construction, provide the mainstay of economic activity across much of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The strengthening terms of trade over 1999-2000, thanks to firmer oil prices, were instrumental in...

International banking: its role in Florida's economy at the outset of the twenty-first century.
One of the most remarkable economic developments of the 1970s for the State of Florida was its emergence in the international financial world. Florida's economy, which until then was essentially relying on tourism, agriculture and the construction industry, began during the 1970s to gradually acquire a new dimension- international...