Panourgias, Nikiforos

Nikiforos.Panourgias@wbs.ac.uk

Information and communication technologies and the integration of financial marketplaces: the development of the Euroclear Single Platform for cross-border securities settlement

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(2008)

While cross-border financial activity continues to grow, facilitated by the adoption of digital electronic information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the multi-jurisdictional presence of large financial corporations, securities marketplaces have remained stubbornly non-global.

Why has marketplace integration lagged when ICTs have made possible the linking of geographically remote transacting parties and enhanced their calculative capabilities? This question raises issues regarding distinctions between markets and marketplaces and the implication of ICTs in the constitution of financial marketplaces that this research seeks to address through a study of an initiative to integrate, using ICTs, the securities marketplaces of the UK and Ireland, France, Belgium, Holland, and Brussels-based international central securities depository Euroclear Bank.

Adopting an approach informed by the social studies of finance that emphasise the importance of systematic knowledge and material practices in the functioning of financial markets, the central empirical focus of the research is to trace the articulation of human and non-human entities involved in the development of the proposed cross-border securities settlement platform. The study shows that integrating securities marketplaces is a far from neat process based exclusively on the integration of ICTs. Instead, a meticulous re-articulation of the entire sociotechnical architectures that format the encounters between transacting parties and transacting parties and objects of exchange is required. Technical issues become part of wider controversies as the new arrangements take shape, interrogating the world - both conceptual and material - surrounding them, as points of interface between the emerging system and other sociotechnical networks it comes into contact with become nodes of actions, questions, and reactions from agencies required to respond to the demands of the new platform. In the process, competing assumptions built into these entities are rendered explicit and contestable, with the experiment of ICT-based marketplace integration becoming embroiled in trials of rival visions of politico-economic integration.

Supervisors:  Susan Scott, PhD
                    Professor Jannis Kallinikos, PhD

Nikiforos Panourgias is currently a Research Fellow in the the Innovation, Knowledge and Organisational Networks research unit (IKON) at Warwick Business School
 

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