Advance Financial Accounts Innovation
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Wikipedia
Financial innovation is the act of creating new financial instruments as well as new financial technologies, institutions, and markets. Recent financial innovations include hedge funds, private equity, weather derivatives, retail-structured products, exchange-traded funds, multi-family offices, and Islamic bonds (Sukuk). The shadow banking system has spawned an array of financial innovations including mortgage-backed securities products and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).
There are 3 categories of innovation: institutional, product, and process. Institutional innovations relate to the creation of new types of financial firms such as specialist credit card firms like Capital One, electronic trading platforms such as Charles Schwab Corporation, and direct banks. Product innovation relates to new products such as derivatives, securitization, and foreign currency mortgages. Process innovations relate to new ways of doing financial business, including online banking and telephone banking.
Economic theory has much to say about what types of securities should exist, and why some may not exist (why some markets should be “incomplete”) but little to say about why new types of securities should come into existence.
One interpretation of the Modigliani-Miller theorem is that taxes and regulation are the only reasons for investors to care what kinds of securities firms issue, whether debt, equity, or something else. The theorem states that the structure of a firm’s liabilities should have no bearing on its net worth (absent taxes). The securities may trade at different prices depending on their composition, but they must ultimately add up to the same value.
Furthermore, there should be little demand for specific types of securities. The capital asset pricing model, first developed by Jack L. Treynor and William F. Sharpe, suggests that investors should fully diversify and their portfolios should be a mixture of the “market” and a risk-free investment. Investors with different risk/return goals can use leverage to increase the ratio of the market return to the risk-free return in their portfolios. However, Richard Roll argued that this model was incorrect, because investors cannot invest in the entire market. This implies there should be demand for instruments that open up new types of investment opportunities (since this gets investors closer to being able to buy the entire market), but not for instruments that merely repackage existing risks (since investors already have as much exposure to those risks in their portfolio).
If the world existed as the Arrow-Debreu model posits, then there would be no need for financial innovation. The model assumes that investors are able to purchase securities that pay off if and only if a certain state of the world occurs. Investors can then combine these securities to create portfolios that have whatever payoff they desire. The fundamental theorem of finance states that the price of assembling such a portfolio will be equal to its expected value under the appropriate risk-neutral measure.
The extensive literature on principal–agent problems, adverse selection, and information asymmetry points to why investors might prefer some types of securities, such as debt, over others like equity. Myers and Majluf (1984) develop an adverse selection model of equity issuance, in which firms (which are trying to maximize profits for existing shareholders) issue equity only if they are desperate. This was an early article in the pecking order literature, which states that firms prefer to finance investments out of retained earnings first, then debt, and finally equity, because investors are reluctant to trust any firm that needs to issue equity.
Duffie and Rahi also devote a considerable section to examining the utility and efficiency implications of financial innovation. This is also the topic of many of the papers in the special edition of the Journal of Economic Theory in which theirs is the lead article. The usefulness of spanning the market appears to be limited (or, equivalently, the disutility of incomplete markets is not great).
Allen and Gale (1988) is one of the first papers to endogenize security issuance contingent on financial regulation—specifically, bans on short sales. In these circumstances, they find that the traditional split of cash flows between debt and equity is not optimal, and that state-contingent securities are preferred. Ross (1989) develops a model in which new financial products must overcome marketing and distribution costs. Persons and Warther (1997) studied booms and busts associated with financial innovation.
The fixed costs of creating liquid markets for new financial instruments appears to be considerable. Black and Scholes (1974) describe some of the difficulties they encountered when trying to market the forerunners to modern index funds. These included regulatory problems, marketing costs, taxes, and fixed costs of management, personnel, and trading. Shiller (2008) describes some of the frustrations involved with creating a market for house price futures.
One framework proposed by Clayton Christensen draws a distinction between sustaining and disruptive innovations. Sustaining innovation is the improvement of a product or service based on the known needs of current customers (e.g. faster microprocessors, flat screen televisions). Disruptive innovation in contrast refers to a process by which a new product or service creates a new market (e.g. transistor radio, free crowd sourced encyclopedia, etc.), eventually displacing established competitors. According to Christensen, disruptive innovations are critical to long-term success in business.
Disruptive innovation is often enabled by disruptive technology. Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani define foundational technology as having the potential to create new foundations for global technology systems over the longer term. Foundational technology tends to transform business operating models as entirely new business models emerge over many years, with gradual and steady adoption of the innovation leading to waves of technological and institutional change that gain momentum more slowly. The advent of the packet-switched communication protocol TCP/IP—originally introduced in 1972 to support a single use case for United States Department of Defense electronic communication (email), and which gained widespread adoption only in the mid-1990s with the advent of the World Wide Web—is a foundational technology.