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The paper’s aim is to consider how best to formulate sturdy regulatory frameworks for RegTech and SupTech. The paper appraises how key features of EU and UK regulatory and policy initiatives can contribute to a functional framework for RegTech and SupTech.

The paper refers to the most comprehensive empirical findings within the EU and the UK on RegTech and SupTech, including reports released by the European Banking Authority and the Bank of England. As data is only gradually becoming available about the true rate of adoption of RegTech and SupTech, the paper identifies salient areas that warrant analysis from emerging findings. In light of the relatively restricted sources of empirical data, the article’s methodological approach is directed towards the most wide-ranging and detailed sources that are currently available at EU and UK levels.

The paper reveals distinct variations in how the EU and UK have pursued regulatory approaches towards RegTech and SupTech growth. However, there are many shared features in the respective approaches. The paper argues that a regulatory framework should ideally be imbued with overarching strategies and policy objectives, as well as with practical measures through innovation facilitators, such as sandboxes. Yet, legislative (top-down) intervention will be the significant ingredient in guaranteeing legal clarity for RegTech and SupTech.

By understanding the nuances in EU and UK approaches, the paper advocates for pragmatic reasoning when formulating a regulatory response. The importance of the article is in its focus on the elements of EU and UK regulatory approaches that are most capable of guaranteeing clarity on standards relating to RegTech and SupTech. The paper makes a vital contribution to existing commentary by determining how a balance can be struck between “top-down” and “bottom-up” types of regulation (i.e. should regulation be entirely concerned with industry-driven standards, such as codes of conduct?).

This paper aims to conceptualize and empirically illustrate the challenges that financial market regulation presents to politicians and the organization tasked with specifying regulations and supervising their implementation in the interest of users and consumers of financial instruments. It analyses the problem from the viewpoint of the governor's dilemma and the control/competence conflict, the linked problem of the rent-seeking of agents/intermediators and consumers of financial instruments. Political accountability problems are enhanced by the materiality of the technologies used, i.e. algo trading.

The paper theoretically conceptualizes and empirically illustrates the argument.

The paper finds that regulators of digitalized financial markets are faced with considerable problems and depend on private agents when regulating financial transactions. However, the new technological instruments also offer new possibilities for securing compliance.

Further research should focus more in-depth on the cooperation between public and private actors in the specification and implementation of regulatory details. It should further investigate the conditions which allow regulators to use RegTech in the surveillance of financial firms.

Since financial market transactions are opaque for most users, the creation of more transparency is crucial to hold regulators accountable in their activity of surveillance of financial firms. New algorithm-based technologies may lend important support in doing so.

By linking the different analytical perspectives, i.e. the governor's dilemma vis-à-vis the intermediator or agent and the possible rent-seeking of intermediators, under the condition of a highly developed technology of financial transactions as well as the market structure, the paper offers new insights into the limits as well as new opportunities of regulating financial markets allowing for political accountability of regulators and financial firms.

The aim of this research is to contribute to the existing literature about the entrepreneurial conditions in crowd-based contexts by describing how different European countries regulate equity crowdfunding market in order to incentive the investments and protect investors.

Based on a legal acts' analysis, we conduct a qualitative study comparing the crowdfunding regulation addressed to investors. In particular, we focus our analysis on the European countries with the highest concentration of crowdfunding platforms (i.e. the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain).

The results show that some countries, such as the UK, Germany and France, present an investor-oriented approach based on non-restrictive regulation, while other countries, such as Spain and Italy, have a restrictive approach that protects investors excessively and discourages them. In particular, the case study of France shows how the introduction of unrestricted regulation can produce positive effects on the volume of crowdfunding transactions.

The paper is addressed to investors, policymakers and intermediaries (platforms) to help the first in orienting themselves between the different crowdfunding regulations and the latter in aligning and orchestrating rules and norms.

This is the first study that analyses the role of investor-oriented regulations in the promotion of entrepreneurship through the identification of four key factors to monitor equity crowdfunding regulations.

The purpose of this paper is to supply basic insights into the principle of shūrā (consultation) in Islamic banking, the idea of a centralised approach to the corporate governance of Islamic financial institutions (IFIs), the roles of a centralised Sharīʿah board as the highest authority on Sharīʿah issues and its distinguishing features from a de-centralised system and the advantages and disadvantages of the two governance systems.

In analyzing these, the paper adopts the critical legal studies approach and refers to the provisions of the Qurʾan and Sunnah, ijmāʿ (consensus) of Sharīʿah scholars and recent Islamic banking reports.

Despite the fact that the double-digit growth of the current US$2tn Islamic banking industry is a promising sign for its further expansion – expecting to cross the US$6.5tn mark by 2020 – there remains concern over the lack of standardization or rather the diversified approaches to the corporate governance of IFIs across key Islamic banking regions.

There has been much debate surrounding the issue of whether the Islamic banking industry requires a centralised Sharīʿah board at the state level to complement the Sharīʿah boards at the IFIs’ individual level in providing better supervision of the Sharīʿah-compliance of IFIs. The fact that the industry is already equipped with two prominent standard-setting agencies in the form of the AAOIFI, the IFSB does little to suggest that best governance practices – which centre around the themes of consistency, harmony and uniformity – are on the horizon, at least not whilst their issued standards and guidelines remain voluntary for IFIs.

All in all, it is aspired that this paper may assist the reader in evaluating the pros and cons of the whole concept of Sharīʿah board centralisation.

Taking a communication perspective, the paper explores management's rhetoric in profit warnings, whose sole purpose is to disclose unexpected bad news.

Adopting a close-reading approach to text analysis, the authors analyse three profit warnings of the now-collapsed Carillion, contrasting the rhetoric with contemporaneous investor conference calls to discuss the profit warnings and board minutes recording boardroom discussions of the case company's precarious financial circumstances. The analysis applies an Aristotelian framework, focussing on logos (appealing to logic and reason), ethos (appealing to authority) and pathos (appealing to emotion) to examine how Carillion's board and management used language to persuade shareholders concerning the company's adverse circumstances.

As non-routine communications, the language in profit warnings displays and mimics characteristics of routine communications by appealing primarily to logos (logic and reason). The rhetorical profiles of investor conference calls and board meeting minutes differ from profit warnings, suggesting a different version of the story behind the scenes. The authors frame the three profit warnings as representing three stages of communication as follows: denial, defiance and desperation and, for our case company, ultimately, culminating in defeat.

The research is limited to the study of profit warnings in one case company.

The paper views profit warnings as a communication artefact and examines the rhetoric in these corporate documents to elucidate their key features. The paper provides novel insights into the role of profit warnings as a corporate communication vehicle/genre delivering bad news.

The purpose of this study is to understand the profit implications of analytics-driven centralized discriminatory pricing at the headquarter level compared with sales force price delegation in the purchase of an aftermarket good through an indirect retail channel with symmetric information.

Using individual-level loan application and approval data from a North American financial institution and segment-level customer risk as the price discrimination criterion for the firm, the authors develop a three-stage model that accounts for the salesperson’s price decision within the limits of the latitude provided by the firm; the firm’s decision to approve or not approve a sales application; and the customer’s decision to accept or reject a sales offer conditional on the firm’s approval. Next, the authors compare the profitability of this sales force price delegation model to that of a segment-level centralized pricing model where agent incentives and consumer prices are simultaneously optimized using a quasi-Newton nonlinear optimization algorithm (i.e. Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno algorithm).

The results suggest that implementation of analytics-driven centralized discriminatory pricing and optimal sales force incentives leads to double-digit lifts in firm profits. Moreover, the authors find that the high-risk customer segment is less price-sensitive and firms, upon leveraging this segment’s willingness to pay, not only improve their bottom-line but also allow these marginalized customers with traditionally low approval rates access to loans. This points out the important customer welfare implications of the findings.

Substantively, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to empirically investigate the profitability of analytics-driven segment-level (i.e. discriminatory) centralized pricing compared with sales force price delegation in indirect retail channels (i.e. where agents are external to the firm and have access to competitor products), taking into account the decisions of the three key stakeholders of the process, namely, the consumer, the salesperson and the firm and simultaneously optimizing sales commission and centralized consumer price.

This paper aims to apply a multidimensional approach to assessing the financial well-being of European countries.

Financial well-being is a very complex phenomenon to measure because it is composed of different dimensions. Therefore, this paper uses a multidimensional and fuzzy methodology to assess financial well-being in Europe. The financial well-being fuzzy indicator was calculated using European Quality of Life Survey data.

Financial well-being is heterogeneous across European countries. This evidence is confirmed both at the level of overall financial well-being and at the level of sub-indices. The degree of financial well-being is not directly related to wealth as traditionally measured (i.e. GDP), but shows some correspondence with socio-economic characteristics of the population and with governance and cultural elements of a country.

Understanding financial well-being could help financial institutions to transition from a one-size-fits-all approach to a more tailored approach when they provide financial services and could help policy makers to consider financial well-being when they decide how and where to allocate public spending.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to employ a fuzzy methodology for the analysis of financial well-being in Europe.

This study aimed to identify the proportion and factors influencing the use of maternal health services (MHS) in rural Thawang, Rolpa, Nepal.

This was a community-based cross-sectional study conducted among 417 mothers who had given birth in the previous two years. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regression was applied to identify associations and predictors.

The results showed that the use of maternal health services was 50.8%. Adjusting for all other factors in the final model, age group 25–30 years (AOR: 2.30; 95% CI: 1.199–4.422), spouse communication (AOR: 7.31; 95% CI: 2.574–20.791), high accessibility (AOR: 2.552, 95% CI: 1.402–4.643) and high affordability (AOR: 10.89; 95% CI: 4.66–25.445) were significant predictors.

This is a community-based cross-sectional study, and hence cannot establish causal relationships. The research was conducted in a limited rural area mid-Western Nepal, and this may limit the generalization of results to other settings of the country.

This research supports to local level government and district health authority to develop and implement need based action to increase maternal health service in the local context.

Underutilization of maternal health services is the result of socioeconomic dynamics, poor access to health services and other physical developments. To increase utilization of maternal health services in rural areas, there is a need to tackle the root cause of health inequality such as reducing poverty, increasing female education, involving women in employment and increasing access to health as a priority development agenda by government authorities. This research supports local level government and district health authorities to develop and implement needs-based action to increase MHS in the local context.

This paper analyzes global interest in Internet information about decentralized finance (DeFi), embedded finance (EmFi), open finance (OpFi), ocean finance (OcFi) and sustainable finance (SuFi) and the relationship among them.

The paper used a comparative methodology based on regression and correlation analyses to assess global interest in Internet information about DeFi, EmFi, OpFi, OcFi and SuFi.

The findings reveal that global interest in Internet information about EmFi was more popular in Asian and European countries. Global web search for Internet information about OcFi decreased during the financial crisis while global web search for Internet information about OpFi and EmFi increased during financial crisis years. Global web search for Internet information about DeFi, SuFi and EmFi increased during the pandemic years. There is a significant and positive correlation between interest in DeFi, EmFi, OcFi and SuFi. Also, there is a significant and negative correlation between interest in EmFi and interest in OpFi. The regression coefficient matrix shows that OpFi, EmFi, OcFi, DeFi and SuFi are significantly related.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper that analyses the association between interest in DeFi, EmFi, OpFi, OcFi and SuFi. Thus, this study addressed an important knowledge gap in the literature by exploring people’s interest in Internet information about DeFi, EmFi, OpFi, OcFi and SuFi.

Sharīʿah Secretariat plays a significant role in assisting Sharīʿah Supervisory Boards (SSBs) in their role in achieving Sharīʿah compliance in Islamic banks (IBs). The key objective of the study is to develop a organizational framework of the Sharīʿah Secretariat for the IBs in Bangladesh.

The study applied qualitative case study research. The data have been collected from 17 respondents through semi-structured interviews from IBs and professional experts in Bangladesh.

This study proposes a full-time Sharīʿah Secretariat and several departments for further enhancement of the Sharīʿah functions in IBs in Bangladesh. The framework proposed in this study covers the formation, functions, composition, qualification, reporting line, independence, remuneration and terms of appointment of the Sharīʿah Secretariat to set a uniform benchmark for all IBs in Bangladesh. It is anticipated that the outcomes of this research will assist to further strengthen the Sharīʿah governance of IBs in Bangladesh.

This research contributed to the national and global regulatory authorities and IBs by proposing a Sharīʿah Secretariat framework for the smooth functioning of the IBs in Bangladesh. The framework proposed in this study covers the formation, functions, composition, qualification, reporting line, independence, remuneration and terms of appointment of Sharīʿah Secretariat.

This study proposed a framework which is considered the first organizational framework so far for the Sharīʿah Secretariat of IBs in Bangladesh. IBs can apply this proposed framework to form their Sharīʿah Secretariat structure.