Industry WIKI

International asset recovery is any effort by governments to repatriate the proceeds of corruption hidden in foreign jurisdictions. Such assets may include monies in bank accounts, real estate, vehicles, arts and artifacts, and precious metals. As defined under the United Nations Convention against Corruption, asset recovery refers to recovering the proceeds of corruption, rather than br

The International Association of Deposit Insurers (IADI) was formed on 6 May 2002 with the purpose of sharing deposit insurance expertise with the world and contributing to the stability of financial systems as the standard setter for deposit insurance with a global and expanding membership.

The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) is an international financial institution, established in 1944 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States; it is the lending arm of the World Bank Group. The IBRD offers loans to middle-income developing countries. It is the first of five member institutions that compose the World Bank Group. The initial mission o

The International Business Companies Act, 1984 was a statute of the British Virgin Islands which permitted the incorporation of International Business Companies (IBCs) within the Territory. The Act played in a huge role in the economic and financial development of the Territory in the 1990s. It has been called "the most important piece of legislation in BVI history since the emancipati

The International Development Association (IDA) (French: Association internationale de développement) is a development finance institution which offers concessional loans and grants to the world's poorest developing countries. The IDA is a member of the World Bank Group and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. in the United States. It was established in 1960 to complement the existing In

The international dollar (int'l dollar or intl dollar, symbols Int'l$., Intl$., Int$), also known as Geary–Khamis dollar (symbols G–K$ or GK$), is a hypothetical unit of currency that has the same purchasing power parity (PPP) that the U.S. dollar had in the United States at a given point in time. It is mainly used in economics and financial statistics for various purposes, most notably

International finance (also referred to as international monetary economics) is the branch of monetary and macroeconomic interrelations between two or more countries. International finance examines the dynamics of the global financial system, international monetary systems, balance of payments, exchange rates, foreign direct investment, and how these topics relate to international trade.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is an international financial institution that offers investment, advisory, and asset management services to encourage private sector development in developing countries. It is a member of the World Bank Group and is headquartered in Washington, D.C.

An international financial institution (IFI) is a financial institution that has been established (or chartered) by more than one country, and hence is subject to international law. Its owners or shareholders are generally national governments, although other international institutions and other organizations occasionally figure as shareholders. The most prominent IFIs are creations of m

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an international financial institution and a specialized agency of the United Nations, headquartered in Washington, D.C. It consists of 191 member countries, and its stated mission is "working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth,

The euro, which is the currency of the European Union member states in the eurozone, has been used internationally since its launch in 1999. On 1 January 2002, when the currency formally replaced 12 currencies of the original eurozone states, its usage was inherited in territories such as Montenegro which had used pre-euro currencies, while other minor currencies tied to pre-euro currenc

International tax planning also known as international tax structures or expanded worldwide planning (EWP), is an element of international taxation created to implement directives from several tax authorities following the 2008 worldwide recession.

The International Underwriting Association (IUA) of London is a trade association that represents companies that trade in the London insurance market outside Lloyd's of London. They include branches or subsidiaries of nearly all the world's largest international insurance and reinsurance companies.

The United States dollar was established as the world's foremost reserve currency by the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944. It claimed this status from sterling after the devastation of two world wars and the massive spending of the United Kingdom's gold reserves. Despite all links to gold being severed in 1971, the dollar continues to be the world's foremost reserve currency. Furthermore,

Since the late 2000s, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has sought to internationalize its official currency, the renminbi (RMB) or Chinese yuan (CNY). This initiative aims to reduce dependence on the United States dollar and enhance China's influence in the global financial system. Key strategies have included promoting the use of the yuan in international trade invoicing, cross-bord

Intrade.com was a web-based prediction market which offered a platform where individuals could place bets on future outcomes. After having been forced to exclude US traders in 2012, on 10 March 2013 Intrade suspended all trading, citing possible "financial irregularities". For a time after the suspension, the intrade.com website stated that they were working on a relaunch of the site, ca

In finance, an inverted yield curve is a yield curve in which short-term debt instruments (typically bonds) have a greater yield than longer term bonds. An inverted yield curve is an unusual phenomenon; bonds with shorter maturities generally provide lower yields than longer term bonds.

The Investigation Division of the CBDT, abbreviated as Inv-CBDT, is the revenue enforcement agency of the Central Board of Direct Taxes, Government of India. It functions under the Department of Revenue in the Union Ministry of Finance and is concerned with the collection and administration of, as well as enforcement and prosecution of cases related to, the various direct taxes accruing

The Investment Canada Act (ICA; French: Loi sur Investissement Canada, LIC) is a Canadian federal law governing foreign direct investment in Canada. The ICA was one of the first acts of Brian Mulroney's newly elected Progressive Conservative government, receiving royal assent on 20 June 1985. It has been amended at various times, including recently through Bill C-34, An Act to amend th

An investment club is a group of individuals who meet for the purpose of pooling money and investing; members typically meet periodically to make investment decisions as a group through a voting process and recording of minutes, or gather information and perform investment transactions outside the group. In the US the upper limit for the value of an investment club's worth is $25m. There

An investment company is a financial services company that specializes in holding, managing and investing securities. These companies in the United States are regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and must be registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940. Investment companies invest money on behalf of their clients who, in return, share in the profits and losses.

The overall investment climate in Azerbaijan continues to grow despite significant challenges remain. Over the recent years, the country has made efforts to integrate more fully into the global marketplace and attract foreign investment.

Investment outsourcing is the process whereby institutional investors and high-net-worth families engage a third party to manage all or a portion of their investment portfolio. This arrangement can include functions such as establishing the asset allocation, selecting investment managers, implementing portfolio decisions (both strategic and tactical), providing on-going oversight, perfo

Investor relations (IR) is a "strategic management responsibility that is capable of integrating finance, communication, marketing and securities law compliance to enable the most effective two-way communication between a company, the financial community, and other constituencies, which ultimately contributes to a company's securities achieving fair valuation." as defined by National Inv

IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger and cryptocurrency designed for the Internet of things (IoT). It uses a directed acyclic graph to store transactions on its ledger, motivated by a potentially higher scalability over blockchain based distributed ledgers. IOTA does not use miners to validate transactions, instead, nodes that issue a new transaction on the network must approve two

IQ Option is a binary options trading broker that also offers services in Forex, stocks, and cryptocurrencies. The company was founded in 2013. In 2017, IQ Option shifted its focus to CFDs and cryptocurrencies, though binary options remain a significant part of its operations in certain markets, particularly where regulations are less stringent.

The Irish bank strikes between 1966 and 1976 were three strikes of about a year's total duration which closed down all the clearing banks in Ireland. The strikes provided economists with a unique opportunity to study the functioning of a modern economy without access to bank deposits. Despite the significantly reduced access to bank deposits, the economy continued to grow, with cheques b

"Irrational exuberance" is a phrase used by the then-Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, in a December 1996 speech given at the American Enterprise Institute during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. The phrase was interpreted as a warning that the stock market might be overvalued.

The ISDA Master Agreement, published by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), is the most commonly used master service agreement for over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives transactions internationally. It is part of a framework of documents, designed to enable OTC derivatives to be documented fully and flexibly. The framework consists of a master agreement, a schedule,

Islamic banking, Islamic finance (Arabic: مصرفية إسلامية masrifiyya 'islamia), or Sharia-compliant finance is banking or financing activity that complies with Sharia (Islamic law) and its practical application through the development of Islamic economics. Some of the modes of Islamic finance include mudarabah (profit-sharing and loss-bearing), wadiah (safekeeping), musharaka (joint ventu

Islamic banking in Malaysia began in September 1963 when Perbadanan Wang Simpanan Bakal-Bakal Haji (PWSBH) was established. PWSBH was set up as an institution for Muslims to save for their Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) expenses. In 1969, PWSBH merged with Pejabat Urusan Haji to form Lembaga Urusan dan Tabung Haji (now known as Lembaga Tabung Haji).

ISO 4217 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that defines alpha codes and numeric codes for the representation of currencies, and provides information about the relationships between currencies and their minor units. This data is published in three tables:

Israel Alexander Englander (born September 30, 1948) is an American billionaire hedge fund manager. In 1989, he founded his hedge fund, Millennium Management, with Ronald Shear. The fund was started with US$35 million, and as of July 2026 had US$92 billion in assets under management.

J.P. Morgan & Co. was an American financial institution specialized in investment banking, asset management and private banking founded by financier J. P. Morgan in 1871. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, the company is now a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase, the largest banking institution in the world by market capitalization. The company has been historically referred to as th

Sir James Stansfeld, ( STANSS-feeld; 5 March 1820 – 17 February 1898) was a British Radical and Liberal politician and social reformer who served as Under-Secretary of State for India (1866), Financial Secretary to the Treasury (1869–71) and President of the Poor Law Board (1871) before being appointed the first President of the Local Government Board (1871–74 and 1886).

Jane Street Capital is an American electronic market making company headquartered in Manhattan, New York City. It is one of the largest market making firms in the United States along with Virtu and Citadel Securities. It employs approximately 3,000 people across its global offices, and trades across more than twenty countries.

Walter Joseph "Jay" Clayton III (born July 11, 1966) is an American attorney who has served as the 9th director of national intelligence since August 2026. Clayton has additionally served as the White House AI czar since October 2026. He served as the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2025 to 2026 and as the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commissi

Jaywan (Arabic: جيون, lit. 'precious pearl') is an Emirati card payment system wholly owned and operated by Al Etihad Payments (AEP), a subsidiary of the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates.

Jeffrey Steven Yass (born July 1958) is an American billionaire businessman. According to Forbes, Yass had a net worth of US$77.8 billion as of September 2026, up from $27.6 billion in April 2024. The richest man in Pennsylvania, he is also the 25th richest in the world. He is a registered Libertarian who gives money to conservative super PACs including Club for Growth Action and the Pro

Jem Bendell is an emeritus professor of sustainability leadership with the University of Cumbria in the UK. He is best known for originating in 2018 the concept of "deep adaptation" for individuals and communities anticipating (or already coping with) the consequences of ongoing climate change. In 2019 he founded the Deep Adaptation Forum to support peer-to-peer communications in develop

Jerry W. Markham is a professor at the Florida International University College of Law, and a legal scholar on business organizations and securities regulation in the United States. He has been quoted or cited as an expert on the regulation of financial and commodities markets in a wide variety of news sources, and his three-volume collection, A Financial History of the United States, ha

The pound (French: Livre de Jersey, Jèrriais: Louis d'Jèrri; abbreviation: JEP; sign: £) is the currency of Jersey. Jersey is in currency union with the United Kingdom, and the Jersey pound is not a separate currency but is an issue of banknotes and coins by the States of Jersey denominated in sterling, in a similar way to the banknotes issued in Scotland and Northern Ireland (see Bankno

Joel Seligman (born January 11, 1950) is an American legal scholar and former academic administrator. He served as the 10th president of the University of Rochester, in Rochester, New York, from 2005 to 2018. Seligman is also one of the leading authorities on securities law in the United States. Seligman stepped down from his presidency in 2018 following his handling of a university-wide

John Brian Taylor (born December 8, 1946) is an American economist who is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

John C. Coffee Jr. (born November 15, 1944) is the Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law and director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School.

The Joint Forum (previously known as The Joint Forum on Financial Conglomerates) is an international group bringing together financial regulatory representatives from banking, insurance and securities. It works under the international bodies for these sectors, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) and the Inte

Jon Paul Ruggles (born November 28, 1973) is an American executive known for founding Monroe Energy and creating an internal trading house for Delta Air Lines that earned $420 million in trading profits in its first year. According to CNBC, Delta hired Ruggles as vice-president of fuel in 2011 to help right a fuel-hedge book that had been losing the airline money. He managed to generate

JPay is a privately held information technology and financial services provider focused on serving the United States prison system. With headquarters in Miramar, Florida, the company contracts with state, county, and federal prisons and jails to provide technologies and services including money transfer, email, video visitation and parole and probation payments to approximately 1.5 mill

Jürgen von Hagen (born in Iserlohn on December 14, 1955) is a German economist and professor at the University of Bonn, where he currently also serves as director of the Institute for International Economic Policy. He was awarded the Gossen Prize in 1997.

Jurisdictional arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of discrepancies between competing legal jurisdictions. It takes its name from arbitrage, the practice in finance of purchasing a good at a lower price in one market and selling it at a higher price in another. Just as in financial arbitrage, the attractiveness of jurisdiction arbitrage depends largely on its transaction costs,

Kalshi Inc. is a prediction market platform based in Manhattan, New York City, that launched in July 2021. The platform is used primarily for sports betting, which constitutes more than 90% of site activity and 89% of revenue in 2025. Analysts describe activity on the platform as "heavily tied to the sports calendar". Individuals can place bets on other future outcomes, including economi

Kelkar committee to evaluate PPP in India was a committee set up to study and evaluate the extant public-private partnership (PPP) model in India. The committee was set up by India's central government and headed by Vijay Kelkar. The committee was set up following 2015 Union budget of India by the then finance minister of India Arun Jaitley. It comprised 10 members. The committee submit

Kenneth Saul Rogoff (born March 22, 1953) is an American economist and chess Grandmaster.

The King's shilling, sometimes called the Queen's shilling when the sovereign is female, is a historical slang term referring to the earnest payment of one shilling given to recruits to the armed forces of the United Kingdom in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, although the practice dates back to the end of the English Civil War. To "take the King's shilling" was to agree to serve as a

Klarna Group plc is a Swedish financial technology company and digital bank. Founded in 2005 in Stockholm, Sweden, Klarna provides digital payments, short-term consumer credit, cards, banking services and merchant tools for online and in-store commerce. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is best known for buy now, pay later payment products.

KlickEx is a New Zealand fintech company that provides a payment system for domestic, low value electronic foreign exchange transactions to Polynesian countries using a smart market retail system.

Knife money (Chinese: 刀币) is the name of large, cast, bronze, knife-shaped commodity money produced by various governments and kingdoms in what is now China, approximately 2,500 years ago. Knife money circulated in China between 600 and 200 BCE during the Zhou dynasty.

KodakCoin (stylized KODAKCoin) was a Kodak-branded blockchain cryptocurrency, used to plan payments for licensed photographers. It was also able to generate individualized cryptocurrency for its users through Kodak KashMiner, a Bitcoin-mining computer. Critics characterized Kodak's association with the cryptocurrency as a "desperate money grab."

Kodenshi AUK Group is a conglomerate of two companies, Kodenshi Corporation based in Kyoto, Japan and AUK Corporation based in Iksan, South Korea.

The Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI; Korean: 한국종합주가지수) is the index of all common stocks traded on the Stock Market Division—previously, Korea Stock Exchange—of the Korea Exchange. It is the representative stock market index of South Korea, analogous to the S&P 500 in the United States.

Lagos Preparatory & Secondary School (LPSS) is a private co-educational day school in the affluent Ikoyi suburb of Lagos, Nigeria, and has adopted the UK National Curriculum; it was established in 2002. LPSS which was formerly known as LPS, provides Early Years, Primary and Secondary school education for children from 18 months up to age 16+.

Land banking is the practice of aggregating parcels of land for future sale or development.

Landmark Credit Union is an American credit union providing banking services in Wisconsin and Northern Illinois . It operates as a cooperative and is owned by its members. Landmark provides banking services including, savings accounts, checking accounts, mortgages and investments.

The Latin American debt crisis (Spanish: Crisis de la deuda latinoamericana; Portuguese: Crise da dívida latino-americana) was a financial crisis that originated in the early 1980s (and for some countries starting in the 1970s), often known as La Década Perdida (The Lost Decade), when Latin American countries reached a point where their foreign debt exceeded their earning power and they

The Monetary Convention of 23 December 1865 was a unified system of coinage that provided a degree of monetary integration among several European countries, initially Belgium, France, Italy and Switzerland, at a time when the circulation of banknotes in these countries remained relatively marginal. In early 1866, it started being referred to in the British press as the Latin Monetary Uni

The law of the British Virgin Islands is a combination of common law and statute, and is based heavily upon English law.

Layaway (lay-by in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) is a purchase agreement in which the seller reserves an item for a consumer until the consumer completes all the payments necessary to pay for that item, and only then hands over the item.

LBRY (pronounced "library") is a blockchain-based file-sharing and payment network that is primarily used for social networks and video platforms.

Lease-by-room, also known as individual leasing, is an arrangement whereby a tenant and their roommates pay rent for their own rooms instead of each tenant being equally liable for the rent for the whole apartment. Typically lease-by-room leases are multi-room apartments or townhomes with shared bathrooms and living rooms. What distinguishes lease-by-room leases from joint leases is that

A leasehold estate or a leasehold interest is an ownership of a temporary right to hold land or property in which a lessee or a tenant has rights of real property by some form of title from a lessor or landlord. Although a tenant does hold rights to real property, a leasehold estate is typically considered personal property.

The least developed countries (LDCs) are developing countries listed by the United Nations that exhibit the lowest indicators of socioeconomic development. The concept of LDCs originated in the late 1960s and the first group of LDCs was listed by the UN in its resolution 2768 (XXVI) on 18 November 1971.

Lebanese pound or Lebanese lira is the currency of Lebanon. It was formerly divided into 100 piastres (Arabic: قرش qirsh) but, because of high inflation during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), subunits were discontinued.

Legal tender is a form of money that the law recognises as valid for the discharge of a monetary debt in a jurisdiction. What constitutes legal tender varies between jurisdictions.

Lemon Wallet was a cloud-based digital wallet that allowed users to store digital copies of credit cards, debit cards, reward cards, as well as identification, and other card information. The service was released in July 2011 and the company is based in Palo Alto, California, United States. Wences Casares was the company's CEO.

Lender option borrower option or lender's option borrower's option (LOBO) is a long term borrowing instrument available in the United Kingdom. They involve periodic interest re-fixings, which incorporates two linked options:

Leper colony money was special money (scrip or vouchers) which circulated only in leper colonies (sanatoriums for people with leprosy) due to the fear that money could carry leprosy and infect other people. However, leprosy is not easily transmitted by casual contact or objects; actual transmission only happens through long-term, constant, intimate contact with leprosy sufferers and not

Leslie Lee Alexander (born June 30, 1943) is an American attorney, businessman and financier. He is a former bond trader from New York. He formerly owned the National Basketball Association (NBA) team Houston Rockets for 24 years, from 1993 to 2017.

The proposed bill Let Wall Street Pay for the Restoration of Main Street Bill is officially contained in the United States House of Representatives bill entitled H.R. 4191: Let Wall Street Pay for the Restoration of Main Street Act of 2009. It is a proposed piece of legislation that was introduced into the United States House of Representatives on December 3, 2009 to assess a tax on US f

In finance, leverage, also known as gearing, is any technique involving borrowing funds to buy an investment.

Leverage is defined as the ratio of the asset value to the cash needed to purchase it. The leverage cycle can be defined as the procyclical expansion and contraction of leverage over the course of the business cycle. The existence of procyclical leverage amplifies the effect on asset prices over the business cycle.

A leveraged buyout (LBO) is one company's acquisition of another company using a significant amount of borrowed money (leverage) to meet the cost of acquisition. The assets of the company being acquired are often used as collateral for the loans, along with the assets of the acquiring company. The use of debt, which normally has a lower cost of capital than equity, serves to reduce the o

Lewis S. Ranieri (; born 1947) is a former bond trader, and founding partner and current chairman of Ranieri Partners, a real estate firm.

Liberty Reserve was a Costa Rica-based centralized digital currency service that billed itself as the "oldest, safest and most popular payment processor, serving millions all around a world". Liberty Reserve was conceived as a "PayPal for the unbanked," allowing the 2.5 billion people without bank accounts or credit histories to participate in the modern economy. The site had over one mi

The London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (Libor LY-bor) was an interest rate average calculated from estimates submitted by the leading banks in London. Each bank estimated what it would be charged were it to borrow from other banks. It was the primary benchmark, along with the Euribor, for short-term interest rates around the world. Libor was phased out at the end of 2021, with market partic

The Libor scandal was a series of criminal allegations by financial authorities connected to the Libor (London Inter-bank Offered Rate) and the related Euribor benchmark, together with the resulting investigations and prosecutions. All ten convictions in the United States were overturned or vacated by 2022, after appellate courts held there was no evidence traders had broken any laws or

A life settlement or viatical settlement (from Latin viaticum, something received before death) is the sale of an existing life insurance policy (typically of seniors) for more than its cash surrender value, but less than its net death benefit, to a third party investor. Such a sale provides the policy owner with a lump sum. The third party becomes the new owner of the policy, pays the m

The Lightning Network (LN) is a payment protocol built on the bitcoin blockchain. It is intended to enable fast transactions among participating nodes (independently run members of the network) and has been proposed as a solution to the bitcoin scalability problem.

Lightspeed Commerce is a point-of-sale and e-commerce software provider based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It was founded in 2005 by Dax da Silva, who was its CEO until February 2022. It has offices in Montreal, New York, Ottawa, Toronto, London, Belfast, Amsterdam, Berlin, Geneva, Ghent, Melbourne, Ulyanovsk, Yerevan and Tbilisi. It offers its services to retail, restaurant, and hospit

Link (stylised as LINK) is the UK’s main ATM network, which allows consumers to withdraw cash from ATMs which do not belong to their bank. It is the largest interbank network in United Kingdom.

A linked exchange rate system is a type of exchange rate regime that pegs the exchange rate of one currency to another. It is the exchange rate system implemented in Hong Kong to stabilise the exchange rate between the Hong Kong dollar (HKD) and the United States dollar (USD). The Macao pataca (MOP) is similarly linked to the Hong Kong dollar.

Liquidation or winding-up is the process in law by which a company is brought to an end and its assets and property distributed to claimants. When a company has been liquidated, it is sometimes said to be wound-up or dissolved, although dissolution technically refers only to the final stage of liquidation.

In financial economics, a liquidity crisis is an acute shortage of liquidity. Liquidity may refer to market liquidity (the ease with which an asset can be converted into a liquid medium, e.g. cash), funding liquidity (the ease with which borrowers can obtain external funding), or accounting liquidity (the health of an institution's balance sheet measured in terms of its cash-like assets)

This is a list of bank runs. A bank run occurs when a large number of bank customers withdraw their deposits because they believe the bank might fail. As more people withdraw their deposits, the likelihood of default increases, and this encourages further withdrawals. This can destabilize the bank to the point where it faces bankruptcy.

This is a list of banking crises. A banking crisis is a financial crisis that affects banking activity. Banking crises include bank runs, which affect single banks; banking panics, which affect many banks; and systemic banking crises, in which a country experiences many defaults and financial institutions and corporations face great difficulties repaying contracts. A banking crisis is ma

This is a list of abbreviations used in a business or financial context.

Disasters can have high costs associated with responding to and recovering from them. This page lists the estimated economic costs of relatively recent disasters.

This is a list of electronic toll collection systems in use on toll roads throughout the world.

Certain large banks are tracked and labelled by several authorities as Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs), depending on the scale and the degree of influence they hold in global and domestic financial markets.

This page, a companion page to tax, lists different taxes by economic design. For different taxes by country, see Tax rates around the world.

A listed investment company (LIC) is an Australian closed-end collective investment scheme similar to investment trusts in the UK and closed-end funds in the United States. Instead of regularly issuing new shares or canceling shares as investors join and leave the fund, investors buy and sell to each other on the ASX. They are traded like other securities on the Australian stock exchange