ICST Transactions on Financial Systems (ISSN: 2032-9458)

Description

The Financial System comprises many entities that interact with each other to provide financial services that are the lifeline of the world economy. The financial business world entails a complex landscape of actors, including banks, regulatory agencies, financial service providers and the communication networks linking them. These actors and their interrelations are related to the area of financial intermediates and financial regulation that were formed to serve a viable world economy. The financial intermediates and the regulators serve as entities that should increase welfare in the economy through efficient capital allocation and risk sharing.
In order to satisfy the requirements of the financial ecosystem, there are a number of market-specific technical requirements for: responsiveness, data integrity, transparency, security and privacy. The financial market indeed stipulates its own specific needs and therefore software and service providers have, over time, implemented domain specific solutions to meet them.
Research in financial infrastructure (FI) falls is in the intersection of three areas: Finance/Economics, Information Systems and Distributed Computing. Finance/Economics needs to define the roles of financial players and the nature of connectivity needed between them. Given that, Information Systems and Distributed Computing should address how these relationships are best architected and implemented by the technological infrastructure.
The need for active research in this area is becoming more apparent in the after mess of the financial crisis of 2008. The ongoing transformation of the financial business is enabled by new technology and research results. This research should propose models and architecture for Financial Systems that will allow smarter control over these critical infrastructures. For example, getting the IT closer to financial business processes is part of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). These models should allow Financial Systems to grow and expand to improve the economy by taking advantage of the best technology. This technology should provide for sometimes conflicting requirements, like: better security and privacy, improved risk mitigation, transparency to regulators and customers.
The ICST Transactions on Financial Systems publishes research in the area of financial infrastructure, providing a forum for both academics and practitioners.
Keywords

Business Intelligence, Analytics, Hedging, Value-at-risk, Pricing, Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, Complex Event Processing, Streaming, Messaging, Fraud, Identity Authentication Management, Risk Management, Security, Privacy, Regulation, Compliance, Standards, Anti Money Laundering, Globalization
Editor-in-Chief
Dr. Eliezer Dekel is an IBM Senior Technical Staff Member. He is managing the Distributed Middleware group in the IBM Haifa Research Lab. He led the development of the Distribution and Consistency Services (DCS) component for WebSphere. The DCS component is the foundation for WebSphere’s High Availability. It is the first virtual synchrony group communication implementation that is part of commercial application server. Another technology developed by the Distributed Middleware group is a high throughput low latency publish/subscribe messaging technology. This technology is now available as a low latency product offering from IBM: WMQ LLM. Eliezer Dekel is a subject area editor for the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC). He served on numerous conference program committees and organized, or served as chair in some of them. Since joining the Haifa Research Lab in 1992, he has been involved in research in the areas of distributed and fault-tolerant computing, service-oriented technology, and software engineering. He is currently working on technologies for providing Quality of Service, with a focus on dependability, in very large scale multi-tier environments. For this area he initiated together with colleagues the very successful International Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware (LADIS). He is also involved in the ICT funded CoMiFin (Communication Middleware for Monitoring Financial Critical Infrastructure) project. Eliezer has a Ph.D.and M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Minnesota, and a B.Sc.in mathematics from Ben Gurion University, Israel. Prior to joining the IBM Haifa Research Lab, Eliezer served on the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas computer science department for over ten years.
Editorial Board
Roberto Baldoni
University of Rome “La Sapienza,” Italy
James Clarke
Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland
Evangelos Kotsovinos
Vice President at Morgan Stanley, UK
Francis N. Parr, IBM Research ? Watson