Reading Report#3--Summary

Summary of 《E-Finance: An Introduction》
In “E-Finance: An Introduction”, in Journal of Financial Services Research, 2002, the authors Franklin Allen, James Mcandrews, Philip Strahan define E-Finance as “the provision of financial services and markets using electronic communication and computation” (Franklin Allen, James Mcandrews, Philip Strahan, 2002, page 5). First of all, they discuss the different impacts—“disintermediation, consolidation and access to credit “ (Franklin Allen, James Mcandrews, Philip Strahan, 2002, page 10, page 12 and page 13) e-finance technologies exert on financial services firms, including financial intermediaries, insurance and security firms. Later they describe the development of a personal online payment system “in response to a specific demand – online auctions” (Franklin Allen, James Mcandrews, Philip Strahan, 2002, page 19). At last, the writers talk about the information and communication technology’s impact on different financial markets. They state that both the stock market and the foreign exchange market employ electronic trading to a large scale while the bond market barely makes use of electronic trading. In conclusion, they claim that the common access to Internet will endow e-finance with more and more opportunities.