Mobile Payment

Recently, the commercialization of various convenience services using beacon on the Bluetooth low energy technology is on the rise as one of the results of technological innovation by the information communication technology, which rapidly develops with the coming of the fourth industrial revolution. In addition, due to expansion of the scope of information communication infrastructure and things such as “smart city”, a large-scale convergence contents platform based on the IoT becomes one of the major issues in the IT industry. However, the technical measure concerning the management and processing of data collected by wireless sensor devices such as beacons is still unclear, and the concrete solutions to this problem are currently needed. Therefore, this study suggests one basic point about the technique to analyze and manage the large data collected by the beacon. It also efficiently provide the converged contents service using the user information data stored in the server. The development of this application enhances the social utilization value of beacon service in the future.

Facing the great transformations once in a century and the changes in major social contradictions in China, China has treated the principle of “innovation, openness, distribution and rule of law” as strategic priorities for its medium and long-term economic and social development, so as to enhance its core competitiveness based on “innovation” and “openness”, modernize national governance based on “distribution” and “rule of law”, and gain a longer period of strategic opportunities for its future development.

President Xi Jinping emphasized that the financial system is an important fundamental system for economic and social development. In the new historical period, with the reconstruction of international political and economic order, the efficient and stable operation of the financial system is crucial to the steady growth of China's economy and the smooth transformation of its economic structure.

The 13th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China (2016–2020) (hereinafter referred to as the “13th Five-Year Plan”), deliberated and adopted at the Fourth Session of the 12th National People’s Congress in March 2016, is a programmatic document in the decisive stage of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. Making an overall evaluation of and learning experiences from the implementation of the 13th Five-Year Plan based on the major objectives and tasks defined therein will be of great significance for scientifically formulating medium and long-term development plans.

Artificial intelligence and blockchain are considered among the most well-known technologies. Blockchain is a secure, distributed, and immutable database shared by all parties in a distributed network, in which transaction data can be recorded and is easy to audit. Artificial Intelligence represents today’s paradigm shift, and simultaneously promotes scientific progress and industry development. Combining these two technologies has many potentials, especially when they are related to companies, and the economy. A comprehensive overview of these two emerging fields, and the importance of their integration, is strongly needed. This chapter gives an overview of artificial intelligence technology, then, the importance of the integration of artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies is discussed. Also, the potential of their integration in the business field is discussed to transform businesses toward digitization, and enhance several processes, such as cross-border trade and transactions’ payments inside the business environment. Besides, this chapter discusses the effect of their integration on the circular economy for helping to reach a zero-waste ecosystem, on the alternative money system leading to the transformation of the current financial system, on the token economy in providing secured decentralized digital platforms, and finally, provides conclusions and future works about what are the expectations from their integration.

In the social environment with the rapid development of information technology, the importance of educational technology in the field of education is becoming more and more prominent. Traditional music teaching methods limit the openness and extensibility of music classrooms to a certain extent, and have been unable to meet the current needs of big data. Therefore, it is necessary to design a new music resource sharing system based on the mobile terminal. The hardware part designs the MAC resource controller and the data controller, and the software part first designs the music teaching resource sharing architecture. Secondly, the music teaching resource sharing module is designed based on the mobile terminal, so as to realize the music teaching resource sharing. The system test results show that the designed music teaching resource sharing system has good performance and certain application value, which can be used as a reference for subsequent music teaching.

One of the many motivations of this book is the presentation of the interplay between business model, revenue model, and pricing process. The starting point for price management is the business model (see Chap. 3 ). It is about a clear understanding of one’s own added values and the underlying value creation processes. This results in potential revenue sources and revenue partners (see Chap. 4 ). Suitable price models are derived on the basis of the revenue model. Price models (“how to charge?”) define the qualitative basis on which quantitative price levels (“how much to charge?”) area based. Price models are systems with multiple interacting parts. The object of price modeling is to answer the questions of what for, when, by whom, and on the basis of which parameters the price is defined. Digitization offers enormous opportunities for differentiation in pricing. Not via the price amount as such (“numerator” of the pricing formula). But via the price model (the “denominator” of the price). Numerous success stories prove that innovative price models have a very strong impact on perceived customer benefits. With value-based reference bases, the customer’s attention is shifted to the performance or the financial result. Innovative price models not only lead to a better monetization of benefits but are a value driver in their own right for the customer: They increase the value to customer (and thus enhance the business model)! The consequence of this is that price management is not just “value capturing” (monetization). Pricing can also contribute to value generation.

Nigeria boasts of enormous creative resources and industries with multi-dimensional impacts on public and private spheres. The Big Brother Naija TV Show which premiered in 2006 is arguably the most popular mega-entertainment product in Nigeria’s over $12 billion creative industry. Despite the mixed reactions from different sections of the public about BBN, the live TV show continues to receive phenomenal transnational reception and significant economic accretion. Although academic literature on the Show is limited, in this chapter, the authors consider the economic prospects and contributions of the BBN to the Nigeria’s Orange economy. The chapter argue that the value-chain effects of the Show are undervalued creative products that have the huge potential to boost the economic fortunes of Nigeria through the local and global entertainment value that the brand offers.

Fintech involves advanced technology-based solutions for the customers while not being dependent on the banking system and rather focuses on the other virtual currency options. The emergence of these methods especially cryptocurrencies and blockchains after the financial crisis of 2008–9 is more important for the sustainability and development of a country since Fintech is also an advancement in mediums of money flow. The present research has explored the effect of Fintech on sustainable development (economic, society, and environment) while focusing on the existing literature. The previous literature and theories represent that there is a significant influence of Fintech on sustainable development however, the influence differs in different countries and situations. Based on this, the study has identified that there has been no research on the role of the Covid 19 pandemic among Fintech and sustainable development of Bahrain and suggested quantitative research for the future.

Digital transformation has long been a consensus among companies at home and abroad, and the proliferation of digital disruption to the traditional industries has inspired more companies to be passionate about digital transformation. This Chapter comprehensively outlines the analysis in detail of how digitalization disrupts the traditional industries from the three dimensions of strategic level, efficiency level and user experience, and discusses the misconceptions of digital transformation.

Financial inclusion is identified as a driver of sustainable development and a necessary condition for social and economic development. Yet, most people in developing countries face numerous constraints and barriers that exclude them from the financial system. The recent fintech developments and their ability to reduce these constraints promise to be a potentially useful strategy to enhance financial inclusion. In this chapter, we discuss financial inclusion and provide insights into the current state of fintech in the developing world particularly, Mobile Money—on financial inclusion and development outcomes. Being global leaders in mobile money, Sub-Saharan Africa have set the standards for other developing countries to replicate for enhanced financial inclusion. We also show that the implications and impacts of different forms of fintech on financial inclusion, and through financial inclusion on social and economic outcomes, represent one of the most exciting and important research frontiers in the field of development finance. The rapid evolvement of fintech products however poses regulatory challenges and calls for careful assessment of regulatory approaches for instance innovation offices, regulatory sandboxes, and RegTechs in regulating the financial ecosystem.

The recent developments in regulation, ICT technologies and purchase and consumption habits of customers are profoundly changing the competitive scenario of the financial services market. In particular in the European context, PSD2, although limited to the payment services segment, is promoting a greater level of competition and efficiency within the market, reducing barriers to entry for new payment service providers (called TPPs, which also include FinTech firms). To this purpose, PSD2 explicitly empowers account holders with the authority to share payment data, removing the financial institution’s role as gatekeeper and starting the Open Banking phenomenon. When banks actively comply with PSD2, new credit and financial ecosystems and Open Banking platforms can arise, in which participants share information through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and develop, produce and distribute innovative and value-added financial products and services for the customer. This chapter aims to theoretically examine to what extent information sharing, although limited by regulation, reduces banks' ability to generate value through the management of information asymmetry issues and their ability to build long-term relationships. We argue that banks’ ability to generate value can be negatively affected to the extent that banks decide to preserve their status quo, thus the way in which banks decide to comply with PSD2 is the crucial factor to consider.

Face presentation attack detection (PAD) has received increasing attention ever since the vulnerabilities to spoofing have been widely recognized. The state of the art in unimodal and multi-modal face anti-spoofing has been assessed in eight international competitions organized in conjunction with major biometrics and computer vision conferences in 2011, 2013, 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2021, each introducing new challenges to the research community. In this chapter, we present the design and results of the five latest competitions from 2019 until 2021. The first two challenges aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of face PAD in multi-modal setup introducing near-infrared (NIR) and depth modalities in addition to colour camera data, while the latest three competitions focused on evaluating domain and attack type generalization abilities of face PAD algorithms operating on conventional colour images and videos. We also discuss the lessons learnt from the competitions and future challenges in the field in general.

Die Digitalisierung verändert die Tourismusbranche massiv und so sind die Entwicklungen im Bereich der Digitalisierung und der Künstlichen Intelligenz in den letzten Jahren sowohl in der Tourismuswissenschaft als auch in der Tourismuspraxis immer mehr in den Fokus gerückt. Der Beitrag beschreibt diese Transformationsdynamik und skizziert zunächst, welche technologischen Umwälzungen aus heutiger Sicht das Potenzial haben, die zukünftigen Wettbewerbskräfte und Organisationsstrukturen der Tourismusindustrie zu verändern. In einem zweiten Schritt wird diskutiert, wo die touristischen Leistungsträger in diesem Wandel heute stehen. Hierzu wird die digitale Reife der Tourismusindustrie hinterfragt und es werden aktuelle Problembereiche herausgearbeitet, die auf dem Wege der digitalen Transformation im Tourismus als wesentlich erachtet werden. Im Ergebnis wird deutlich, dass es zum Erreichen einer Position des Digital Leadership mehr braucht als reine Technologiekompetenz. Um in einem Umfeld starken Wandels erfolgreich zu sein, ist eine strategische Herangehensweise unabdingbar, um aus einem traditionellen Tourismusangebot ein digitalisierungs- und damit auch zukunftsfähiges Geschäftsmodell zu transformieren.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the reform and opening-up. At the age of 40, China’s reform and opening-up has also changed from the original style of “crossing the river by feeling for stones” to a new era of paying more attention to top-level design.

Sabah, East Malaysia, is home to an estimated two million irregular migrants from the Philippines and Indonesia. The Malaysian government responds to their presence with policies of detention and deportation, thus impacting everyday practices of work, living and even courtship. For many single females within these communities, seeking a romantic partner fulfils both cultural necessities as well as personal security and safety needs. This route is traditionally rigid, thus requiring communal approval and consideration to ensure the best intersections of health, wealth and most importantly, distance from arrest. For the women in this study, limiting and disempowering narratives can be alleviated through online digital avatars. Participants turn to online spaces through social media, which they use as an avenue to not only explore (multiple) romantic possibilities to their own liking, but also to interrogate identity and representation as irregular female migrants through these avatars. By analysing this “catfishing” phenomenon using Bourdieu’s social capital theory, I will unpack how shared norms, values and relationships are formed through carefully crafted avatars in this new digital frontier.

The diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) including the high-speed Internet within the private sector and the exemplar of the private sector’s implementation and use of e-commerce and e-business have caused the public sector around the world to start thinking about this phenomenon become aware of its potentials and consequently utilize them. Therefore, governments around the world started investing heavily in e-Government projects, along with e-services in order to exploit the expected benefits of this phenomenon. E-Government is a new approach followed by nations in providing better services to people and businesses. It increases the efficiency of departments, reduces the cost, streamlines the processes and thus provides several benefits to all stakeholders involved. In this paper, we describe a case study on the successful implementation of e-Government in Jordan using Chan, Lau, and Pan’s e-Government Implementation Framework. The various e-Government initiatives undertaken by the Jordanian government have been described using the four components, namely information content, ICT infrastructure, e-Government Infostructure, and e-Government promotion.

The ongoing geopolitical tensions and conflicts between China and the United StatesUnited States (US) on various fronts including trade, technology, and national securitySecurity have marked an escalating “New Cold WarNew Cold War” (or “Warm War”) in the current global superpower competition between a rapidly rising power in the East and an established but declining incumbent in the West. Further, both the geopolitical tensions and people’s living conditions have been worsened by the COVID-19COVID-19 pandemic that has affected and will continue to shape the superpower rivalry and the post-COVID-19 socioeconomic recovery in China, the United StatesUnited States (US), and many places in-between.

Mobile devices have become integral parts of our lives—particularly smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and all the variants of Android phones. Unlike our desktop machines, mobile phones are mobile computers we carry with us everywhere, outside the more secure confines of our home. This chapter is dedicated to helping you make your smartphones more secure and private.

We’ve talked about how to surf the Web safely and covered the basics of digital communications. Now we need to cover a few other related topics that have to do with your online behavior in general. We’ll cover online banking and shopping, social media, cloud storage services, and just commonsense tips for living in the digital age.

Increasing the sense of security of consumers puts forward higher requirements for risk control of e-commerce transactions. This chapter classifies the risk of e-commerce transaction from many angles. According to the stage of e-commerce transaction, the risk of e-commerce transaction can be divided into pre-transaction risk, mid-transaction risk, and post-transaction risk. According to the participants of e-commerce transactions, the risks of e-commerce transactions can be divided into the transaction risks of e-commerce platform operators, the transaction risks of platform operators, and the transaction risks of consumers. This chapter describes how to identify the risk of e-commerce transactions, constructs the risk evaluation index system of e-commerce transactions, introduces the risk control decisions, and on the basis of defining the concept of “norms”, sorts out the norms that the participants of e-commerce transactions should comply with in different stages of e-commerce transactions. At the same time, e-commerce transaction risk control is inseparable from market supervision, industry self-discipline, and social supervision.

Third-party libraries (TPL) make Apps’ functionality diversified but introduce severe security risks. Precisely detecting and analyzing TPLs is challenging because their code usually is not publicly available or obfuscated. Prior studies do not perform well in detecting closed-source or obfuscated TPLs and analyzing their privacy risks.In this paper, we propose a novel approach to detect TPLs in Android Apps and analyze privacy leakage caused by TPLs. The key idea of our approach is that it leverages the call frequencies of different types of APIs as features and conducts a clustering algorithm on these features, our approach works well on obfuscated TPLs, especially those with dead code removal and control flow randomization. We also analyze whether there is privacy leakage in a TPL by dynamically instrumenting privacy-related APIs and inspecting its call stack. We implement our approach in a tool named Libmonitor and evaluate it on 162 obfuscated Apps and 217 real-world Apps. Experimental results show that Libmonitor outperforms two state-of-the-art tools on two datasets. With obfuscated TPLs, Libmonitor improves 394.08% over Libradar and 26.32% over LibD on F1 metric, respectively. With closed-source TPLs, Libmonitor increases 18.66% over Libradar and 150.15% over LibD on F1 metric, respectively. Besides, Libmonitor found 5809 pieces of privacy leakage risks caused by 152 TPLs in 64 real-world Apps.

With the development of new networks, applications in mobile communication networks, such as mobile payment and online classes, have become an indispensable part of people’s lives. The core network is one of the most important components of the mobile communication network, which is not only essential but also complex. If the core network fails, it will cause a substantial economic loss. To ensure the reliability and stability of the mobile core network, operators need to detect abnormalities in Key Performance Indicators (KPI,e.g., average response time). Datasets of KPI are usually unbalanced and have a wide range of features. Therefore, we propose a correlation analysis-based KPI anomaly detection via an ensemble learning frame. This frame first performs data augmentation on the dataset using SMOTE oversampling algorithm and uses the Pearson correlation coefficient method for feature selection, then construct an ensemble learning XGBoost-based anomaly detection method for KPI. Finally, we evaluate our scheme with the confusion matrix. The results show that our scheme obtained a high accuracy and recall rate. The training and testing dataset we collected is a KPI dataset of a Chinese operator for the first three months of 2020. It is worth noting that no relevant studies used this dataset before.

Currently, a number of people have access to banking products thanks to numerous digital initiatives. Governments around the world have launched a number of programs to promote inclusive growth and financial inclusion. Opening a Basic bank account with the Jan Dhan Scheme is available in India, with simplified KYC procedures and no minimum balance requirement. It is simpler to complete financial transactions on mobile devices thanks to mobile connectivity. Despite having these accounts, many first-time customers are unable to use the financial ecosystem. Instead of improving the delivery of traditional services, digitalization now aims to offer businesses in the financial sector fundamentally new business opportunities and models. Innovative client engagement strategies, new financial instruments, financial businesses, and financial technologies are all provided by Fintech companies and forward-thinking banking and financial services institutions. To reach adults, workplace financial education is crucial.

We analyze the Indian government’s and regulators’ contributions to the principles and practices of financial inclusion in enhancing the poor’s access to financial services in the past and present and suggest future corrective actions. We discover that psychological and business factors are the main obstacles. For the development of an innovative digital market and financial system, there is a need for a strong and dynamic ongoing research-based business model, as well as a sense of sustainability and inclusivity. It will support our interventions in regular financial services, including a payment system with new differential players, at an appropriate scale and size. However, this won’t be effective until strategic financial sector development and growth are integrated with financial inclusion.

Incompressibility is one of the most fundamental security goals in white-box cryptography. Given recent advances in the design of efficient and incompressible block ciphers such as SPACE, SPNbox and WhiteBlock, we demonstrate the feasibility of reducing incompressible AEAD modes to incompressible block ciphers. We first observe that several existing AEAD modes of operation, including CCM, GCM(-SIV), and OCB, would be all insecure against white-box adversaries even when used with an incompressble block cipher. This motivates us to revisit and formalize incompressibility-based security definitions for AEAD schemes and for block ciphers, so that we become able to design modes and reduce their security to that of the underlying ciphers. Our new security notion for AEAD, which we name whPRI, is an extension of the pseudo-random injection security in the black-box setting. Similar security notions are also defined for other cryptosystems such as privacy-only encryption schemes. We emphasize that whPRI ensures quite strong authenticity against white-box adversaries: existential unforgeability beyond leakage. This contrasts sharply with previous notions which have ensured either no authenticity or only universal unforgeability. For the underlying ciphers we introduce a new notion of whPRP, which extends that of PRP in the black-box setting. Interestingly, our incompressibility reductions follow from a variant of public indifferentiability. In particular, we show that a practical whPRI-secure AEAD mode can be built from a whPRP-secure block cipher: We present a SIV-like composition of the sponge construction (utilizing a block cipher as its underlying primitive) with the counter mode and prove that such a construction is (in the variant sense) public indifferentiable from a random injection. To instantiate such an AEAD scheme, we propose a 256-bit variant of SPACE, based on our conjecture that SPACE should be a whPRP-secure cipher.

Platforms became important ecosystems in the economic life after the end of the twentieth century. In order to operate more efficiently, platforms as an ecosystem and technology are now widely applied by the different national public administration systems. However, platforms are mainly used by the central administration; the municipalities started to build their own systems. There are several limitations of the application of the platforms in public administration—the majority of them are linked to a lack of resources and expertise. Platforms can be even tools of a latent, ‘stealth’ centralisation, mainly because of the required access to the central data systems. It should be emphasised that the platforms—especially in the business (private) sector—are linked to artificial intelligence (AI) tools. However, compared to the business sector, the government sector has several specialties by which the application of AI is influenced. Therefore, these specialties and the possibilities of the use of AI by the Hungarian public administration are reviewed in our chapter.

The last twenty years have been characterized by the development of digital payment systems driven by innovations, deregulation, and the increased importance of technology users. This led to the appearance of many new products and actors in this field. This article reviews the current digital payment systems and their implication for SMEs (small to middle-sized enterprises) and entrepreneurs. The main objective is to identify and classify current payment technologies, and their trends, and explore their application in SMEs and entrepreneurs in Serbia. The following research questions are formulated: (1) what is the level of application of current payment methods in SMEs and entrepreneurs in Serbia, and (2) what prevents the spread of digital payment methods in these organizations? Research has been done on a sample of 108 SMEs and entrepreneurs from all regions of Serbia. The results show that digital payment methods’ usage depends on the transaction’s role. The biggest obstacle to the spread of digital payment technologies is the cost of implementation and use. The most significant benefits are improved administration, transaction speedup, and a reduced rate of errors. The research contributes by identifying the most frequently used digital payment systems and practical problems and suggesting possible solutions.

This chapter strives to provide a comprehensive overview of current digital payment systems and point out their key opportunities, benefits, and constraints. We will discuss the following methods and channels for digital payment: credit cards, online credits, vouchers, different types of P2P, recurring payments, social pay, micro payments, and others. We will address the importance and role of mobile technologies and services in mobile commerce. Opportunities and challenges in harnessing modern technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence in the context of digital payments will be discussed. For each of the listed concepts, we will discuss pros and cons as well as applications and challenges. Further, we will explore the role of those concepts in real e-commerce ecosystems. In addition, we will discuss changes in digital payment systems caused by global pandemic and perspectives in post Covid-19 era.

FinTech or financial technology has improved financial services through technology and innovation. These revolutionary financial companies are here to stay since they offer significant benefits to users, such as more incredible speed or lower commissions on their transactions. They are very competitive in the market, being more attractive than banks. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are starting to start a business, and FinTechs represent an excellent opportunity to start a sustainable green business over time and fast-growing. Naturally, it is not an easy task to launch a new FinTech; it requires hard work, but it has great rewards. Due to those above, it is essential to analyze its implications deeply.

ARM TrustZone is a system-on-chip security solution that provides hardware guarantees to isolate the untrusted applications running in the normal world from sensitive computation and data by placing them in the secure world. In a multi-tenant scenario, such isolation is paramount to protect tenants from each other and is guaranteed by partitioning resources (memory, peripherals, etc.) between the tenants. Several third-party defence mechanisms add to this isolation through techniques like statically whitelisting communication channels. Consequently, two tenants cannot communicate with each other except using two legitimate channels: (1) shared memory and (2) legitimate API calls. However, we show that seemingly simple covert channels can be created to break this isolation and create a third illegitimate channel. We use simple thread counters and TrustZone configurations to demonstrate a break in Trustzone’s isolation through a non-root, cross-core, cross-user, bidirectional (secure to normal world and vice-versa), cross-world covert channel on OP-TEE implementation on ARM TrustZone that, by design, places no limit on channel capacity. Our channel bypasses the established defence mechanisms (which mainly target cache occupancy measurements and performance monitoring units) in ARM TrustZone, achieves a maximum bandwidth of 130 KBps with a 2.5% error rate, and allows arbitrary code execution in the secure world leading to denial-of-service attacks.

In the past 60 years, Xizang has been flourishing in economic and social development. In 2018, the regional GDP exceeded 140 billion yuan, which shows an increase of about 10%.

Technological breakthroughs have made it possible to collect continuous live location information through mobile devices. As such, location-based data has greatly impacted the development of contemporary proximity marketing which takes into account “closeness” between two objects and this is further applied for marketing purposes. As information regarding specific customer locations on their movements into/out of a pre-defined virtual boundary can be detected and identified, through the interactivity between mobile devices and proximity hardware, pre-programmed marketing actions will be triggered and relevant materials will be delivered to customers at the right time and in the right place. These potential customers can eventually be guided away from their original consumption intention. Such geographic location-based, interactive proximity marketing has been receiving increasing attention from both practitioners and academicians in recent years. In this chapter, the authors attempt to clarify the concept, discuss its benefits, elucidate proximity marketing technologies, and illustrate practical implications. Further, a comprehensive review of the limited extant scholarly works is conducted. Through this review, a conceptual framework is thus developed. Finally, an agenda for future research is provided to serve as a base for future studies into this crucial and yet often neglected field of proximity marketing.

We argue that the increasing availability of digital trace data presents substantial opportunities for researchers and policy makers to better understand the importance of social networks and social interactions in fostering economic opportunity and resilience. We review recent research efforts that have studied these questions using data from a wide range of sources, including online social networking platform such as Facebook, call detail record data, and network data from payment systems. We also describe opportunities for expanding these research agendas by using other digital trace data, and discuss various promising paths to increase researcher access to the required data, which is often collected and owned by private corporations.

Having made the case for creative policy engagement within the context of the Great Climate Transformation in the preceding chapters, the present chapter outlines a fit-for-purpose policy approach to address these challenges. Building on the notion of ‘Governing Complexity’, the chapter argues for African policy makers to adopt the role of what has been termed elsewhere as ‘Complex Designers’. As Complex Designers, policy makers would be able to adopt a fox-like approach to policy-making, whereby they can connect disparate policy domains in the quest for a just transition. The chapter then highlights concrete policy initiatives that embody the notion of Governing Complexity. These examples serve as heuristics for thinking about similar policy challenges.

Smartwatches zählen zu den sogenannten Wearables und sind in den letzten Jahren zunehmend Gegenstand empirischer Forschungsarbeiten geworden. Dabei verlagerte sich der Schwerpunkt der Betrachtung von Faktoren, die die Adoption dieser neuen Technologie beeinflussen, hin zu solchen Determinanten, die einen Einfluss auf die dauerhafte Nutzung ausüben. Im Rahmen der kontinuierlichen Nutzung von Smartwatches haben bislang jedoch nur wenige Forschungsbeiträge Faktoren analysiert, die sich auf Gesundheits- und Fitnessaspekte sowie auf neue Funktionalitäten wie die Bezahlfunktion beziehen. Insbesondere die Möglichkeiten der Selbstquantifizierung, welche als eine der Kernfunktionen der Smartwatch angesehen werden kann, wird in bisherigen Untersuchungen weitestgehend vernachlässigt. Daher wird in diesem Beitrag das Expectation-Confirmation-Modell (ECM) (Bhattacherjee, MIS Quarterly 25:351–370, 2001) um den Einfluss des Selbstquantifizierungsverhaltens von Fitness- und Gesundheitsdaten, die Neigung der Nutzer, mobile Bezahlsysteme zu verwenden (Payment) sowie den emotionalen Faktor Enjoyment erweitert. Zur Modellprüfung wurde eine Online-Befragung mit 309 Smartwatch Besitzern durchgeführt. Die Ergebnisse der Strukturgleichungsanalyse belegen die Anwendbarkeit des ECMs im Kontext von Smartwatches. Darüber hinaus konnten positive Einflüsse von Enjoyment und Payment auf Satisfaction sowie der beiden Selbstquantifizierungsvariablen auf die Confirmation und die Perceived Usefulness identifiziert werden. Lediglich der Einfluss von Payment auf Perceived Usefulness stellte sich als nicht signifikant heraus. Basierend auf einer Diskussion dieser Ergebnisse werden zum Abschluss Implikationen für das Management und die weitere Forschung aufgezeigt.

Every connected device must be safe, with no easily compromised card, account, or personal information secured to it, to address the growing security concerns for retailers, consumers, and financial institutions. As a result of that tokenization will be critical in the future of linked devices. Implementing the EMV mechanisms approach, which describes the adoption of payment tokens as a replacement for PANs and how security can be improved by limiting their use to a specific environment, is one way to handle this challenge. By using the approach to hide sensitive data and restrict access to it, this study influences the use of Network tokenization as an alternate strategy for guaranteeing data security in modern cloud computing systems The research also looked at Host Card Emulation (HCE) and Near Field Communication (NFC), which are all utilized in the transaction process to encrypt data from both sides Java Spring Boot and Angular JS were used for both the backend and frontend of the web services, and hash and salting algorithms were employed to ascertain the token value from the cardholder. Tokenization systems are easy to set up and may be used in a variety of ways in IT systems to maintain data security.

Financial innovation is robustly revolutionising financial inclusion and financial development, especially in sub-Saharan African countries. Given the extensive informal economy in the region, an urgent desire to ease financial transactions has become even more paramount. This chapter describes the nature and extent of financial innovation in Ghana. It presents an overview of how Ghana is harnessing financial innovation to facilitate financial inclusion. The emerging facts suggest that mobile money technology has resulted in the most expansive outreach of financial services. Although the widespread success of mobile money services is significant for financial inclusion, this chapter also highlights the insidious threat posed by accompanying fraudulent activities. Consequently, the overall success of the financial innovation drive would require a robust and sustained welfare-enhancing mechanism to produce a more satisfied clientele which would lead to a meaningful and positive financial development.

Enterprise transformation is a process of dynamic selection, adjustment and change of strategy in response to changes in the external environment. Change refers to the process that an organization constantly undergoes within its internal organizational system, process, technology and management system in order to effectively respond to challenges and opportunities brought about by the external environment. Enterprise transformation and change originates from the high-level leadership team’s cognition, response or guidance to the new trends and patterns evolved from the environment, market, customers, technology and service.

The purpose of this research is to demonstrate how retailers have used the digital transformation to mitigate the negative effects of COVID-19. As this research aims to understand a real-life phenomenon for which there is very limited knowledge, we created the opportunity to empirically explore the digital transformation in the retail industry during COVID-19 pandemic. In general terms, the research follows a qualitative, descriptive, and exploratory case study design. The results have shown that retailers should focus on technological innovations, adapt their business models, manage their distribution channels, and strengthen their customer-centric strategy. Moreover, it is necessary to emphasize that while smart retail is gradually standing out in the sector, there are also some factors that have not been overcome, such as lack of digital culture, training, and digital leadership. Despite these identified difficulties, the adoption of a digital strategy will allow a differentiating, safe and secure shopping experience, which today is one of the decisive factors for the survival of companies. The COVID-19 pandemic had social and economic effects in all industries – retail was no exception. In turn, the digital technologies already used by companies began to contribute to retailers being able to respond more quickly to customer needs, having been fundamental in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of the first to explore this topic, bringing new contributions to theory and managerial practice.

Research into PoS technologies has demonstrated a number of positive influences on services, such as increasing flexibility, the adaptability of frontline employees and perceived customer customisation as well as improving customer satisfaction. Recent literature has highlighted that more innovative service technologies, including AR or VR in particular, enrich the customer-service experience, heightening the entertainment value for customers and also accelerating the purchase-decision process.

China’s rising global status in different realms predominantly through major projects such as Belt and Road Initiative, continuum on status quo in the Middle East, led China to seek potential cooperation opportunities on emerging technologies, based on anti-US alternatives which clearly directed to regional powers such as Iran. Drawing on the strategic documents signed by Iran and China during the last decade and focusing on the military and technological agreements between the two countries, this chapter seeks to find possible avenues to examine the nexus between the increasing importance of emerging technologies and Chinese–Iran cooperation on AI. We argue that Iran and China, as two anti-US countries, are trying to form a potential capability to oppose the US hegemony by cooperating in artificial intelligence.

Information Communication and Technology has developed to a vast extent and helps for better service quality. Self-service technologies assume significance as people start rapidly using this all over the country. Many transactions in real time are carried out by means of several self-service technologies. Using self-service technologies for the payment of electricity bills has become convenient, simple and easy to do even from remote places. Present day, people switch over to these technologies due to many benefits being accrued to users as whole rather than normal payments by depending on others. This paper highlights three important elements or factors such as personality traits, dominating factor and consumer satisfaction which drive consumer’s technology adoption on payment of electricity bills through various viable online platforms to avoid standing in long crowded queue.

Existing conceptual debates on frugal innovation have either welcomed its contribution to development or stressed its exploitative capitalist underpinnings. Based on a qualitative survey among 52 mobile money agents and tellers in Kitwe, Zambia, the developmental potential of frugal innovation will be empirically assessed. Can the frugal innovation of mobile money become an inclusive innovation for the agents and tellers in Kitwe? This question will be tackled by focusing on entrepreneurship and labour relations. It is argued that mobile money can indeed generate employment and foster entrepreneurship, but that it can simultaneously contribute to informalisation and create new socio-economic inequalities. Empirical studies, thus, provide an opportunity to reach a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between frugal innovation and development.Les débats conceptuels existants sur l’innovation frugale ont soit accueilli favorablement sa contribution au développement, soit mis l’accent sur ses fondements capitalistes abusifs. En se basant sur une enquête qualitative auprès de 52 agents et caissiers d’argent mobile à Kitwe, en Zambie, le potentiel de développement de l’innovation frugale sera évalué de façon empirique. L’innovation frugale de l’argent mobile peut-elle devenir une innovation inclusive pour les agents et les caissiers de Kitwe? Cette question sera abordée en mettant l’accent sur l’entreprenariat et les relations de travail. On fait valoir que l’argent mobile peut effectivement engendrer de l’emploi et favoriser l’entreprenariat, mais qu’il peut simultanément contribuer à l’informalisation et créer de nouvelles inégalités socio-économiques. Les études empiriques permettent donc de comprendre de façon plus nuancée la relation entre l’innovation frugale et le développement.

The Chinese financial market, the financial regulations, the importance of the financial market for the Chinese Communist Party as well as the effects of the Chinese financial policy on the global financial market are shown. To this end, the general financial and fiscal policy is first presented and the tax structure and the position of formal banks within the financial system are explained. Furthermore, the real estate bubble and the growing shadow banking sector are discussed. In contrast to traditional financial institutions, the FinTech market and crowdfunding are then introduced as potential sources of innovation and technology in the PRC. These passages highlight the elements that have contributed to China becoming a market leader in these areas. An attempt is made to answer the question to what extent the financial market in China is consolidated and what risks exist.

Demand for luxury goods is growing globally by an average of 3–5 percent annually. In 2018, China alone, with about one-fifth of the world’s population, accounted for one-third of global luxury consumption. As luxury consumption is considered a visible symbol of a society’s inequality development, it also expresses the transformation of Chinese society from a communist agrarian society to a society with a capitalist market economy. Since 1978, China has been catching up with the socio-economic development in a compressed form that Western industrialized countries have been undergoing since the beginning of the nineteenth century, in a potential national market of sub-continental scale and under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, which in its pursuit of catching up and catching up is fuelling the capitalist dynamic with promises of wealth and luxury, thus accepting glaring social inequality despite its successes in poverty alleviation. The proportion of the country’s population eligible for sustainable luxury consumption is now estimated at 180–200 million people.

Financial technologies, also known as “FintechFintech,” have brought disruptive changes to virtually every aspect of business and financial services and are becoming increasingly important in the world economic system. Fintech is used to describe technologies and innovations that change the provision of financial services and compete with traditional financial institutions. The concept includes a range of innovative technology-enabled financial services such as mobile payments, digital banking, insurance, wealth management, cryptocurrencies, and cross-border payments.

This chapter, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), briefly examines the historic influences of the fabled network of trade routes once called the Silk Road connecting China and the Far East to the Middle East and the rest of Europe. This had been a conduit from East to West and back again for goods, services, ideas, religions, and people for almost 2,100 years since the age of the Han Dynasty. It has had many on-again, off-again periods of operation due to geopolitical influences and other such interruptions as various war campaigns and lands along the route being conquered by invading empires but has since become a rekindled undertaking and a personal “feather in his cap” for China’s President Xi Jinping who announced to the world in 2013 a new proposition he called One Belt, One Road (OBOR). This chapter will take us through a quick look into the history of the Silk Road itself as well as the origins of OBOR, later renamed as the BRI in 2016, including the many challenges endured over the past eight years. We will review and examine both the negative and positive aspects of what has transpired over this short period of time bringing us up to date with the current “state of affairs” for the BRI including a look at an equally ambitious project announced by the US at the G7 Summit and another one by the EU at the end of 2021 to counter China’s growing influence among the world’s developing nations. The BRI is more than just a “road” of course, and it consists of eight separate trade corridors winding their way through a combination of many countries, each with its own geopolitical and geographical hurdles to overcome. The BRI is an ambitious and monumental pursuit that is fraught with many challenges that present obstacles along every step of the way. These include a variety of issues such as but not limited to enormous financial demands, the lack of infrastructure, timeline constraints, governmental changes within and between nations, natural disasters, and more recently in 2020 a global pandemic that has had an extremely negative impact on most economies around the world and led to the disruption of the supply chains required to keep the initiative on track. Finally, this chapter will discuss the considerations, implications, risks, and rewards for those seeking business opportunities related to the initiative.

In this chapter, China’s historical orientation toward technology, and evolution from fast follower to true innovator are explored. An assessment and timeline illustrating the antecedent conditions which needed to be satisfied for China’s maturity in technology innovation are presented along with a discussion of key emerging trends. The extent to which China’s approach to institutionalized technology research and development is being driven from both the commercial and government sectors is assessed, and practical implications for action provided. Critically, the role of higher education in enabling the fulfillment of China’s technology roadmap is explored both from the perspective of domestic policy within the Chinese mainland and through the strategic leverage of relationships and expertise from overseas universities. The current and likely future prioritization of applications and opportunities of technology development are discussed with a particular focus on industry sectors where China is likely to be able to exploit country-specific competitive advantage. A summary for techniques for engagement with the technology sector in China is provided with a review of protocols, priorities, and restrictions. The chapter concludes with a survey of challenges to be faced by China in maintaining and building on progress to date.

The growth of the service economy is a pervasive phenomenon that drives attention and interest in service research. Some pioneering researchers have been using institutional theories for explaining particular service phenomena (e.g. Heide, 2003; Mishra et al., 1998; Ehret & Wirtz, 2010). Now, a growing range of scholars calls for a stronger consideration of fundamental aspects of institutions in stimulating the rise of services (Edvardsson et al., 2011; Vargo et al., 2022). This chapter proposes a fresh view on service institutionalization and proposes an agenda for studying service systems as the institutionalization of cocreation. The chapter proposes a taxonomy of key service institutions, drawing on Searle’s theory of constitutive rules. The example of digital money shows the contribution of Searle’s concept of constitutive rules by highlighting the interplay of technology and social action to fill institutional voids, enabling cocreation of services and economic development.

Sales without technology is unthinkable, not someday in the future, but today already. Especially, because technology can not just optimize processes and make sales activities more efficient, but also plays a key role in developing new business and sales models, better identifying customer needs and meeting them in more innovative ways. Ultimately, technology plays a key role in designing cutting-edge customer experiences and can be viewed from three perspectives: technology type, sales process and sales tools. With its diverse capabilities, it can support the entire sales process in its every single step and not only meet the expectations of modern customers, but also create differentiation and provide competitive advantage. Lastly, it also increases sales productivity and provides managers with a better basis for decision-making, which is why it becomes indispensable in strategic sales management.

5G small-cell base stations (“Smallcell”) have been widely deployed to enhance network capacity in densely populated city centers. Generally speaking, IPSec is used to secure the backhaul links between the Smallcell network and the core network. However, encryption sometimes serves as a tunnel to hide malware. Encrypted traffic classification of 5G Smallcell backhaul links is rarely discussed in the literature. To our knowledge, we are the first to classify encrypted 5G Smallcell backhaul links using 1D-CNN. We are able to classify 5G Voice, SMS and Internet data with 99.99% accuracy rate and above, and the model is validated using real network data. The work can be used for classifying real encrypted network traffic in general.

Firstly, this chapter presents the network architecture of V2X from the perspectives of V2X communications and applications, CVIS and ITS. Then the technical challenges faced by V2X communications are analyzed, and V2X protocol reference model is elaborated. The key technologies and the standardization progress of the two technical V2X standard systems are reviewed: IEEE 802.11p and C-V2X. They are compared from the following three aspects: the key technologies, simulation performance and field tests on the public road. Especially, the results from both simulation and field test on the public road can prove C-V2X outperforming IEEE 802.11p. Finally, the latest progress of IEEE 802.11p and C-V2X spectrum allocation is introduced, and the reasons for selecting C-V2X as the technology and standards route are summarized.

In diesem Kapitel lernen Sie die operativen Aspekte der Markenführung kennen. Die operative Markenführung hat zwei zentrale Aufgaben: den Aufbau einer starken Marke durch Branding und Markenkommunikation sowie das nachhaltige Management einer Marke entlang aller Kommunikationskanäle und Touchpoints. Daher behandeln wir zum Ersten die Grundbegriffe des Brandings und die Aufgaben der externen und internen Markenkommunikation. Zum Zweiten stellen wir Ihnen verschiedene Instrumente der digitalen Markenführung vor: Online-Marketing, Content-Marketing und Storytelling, Social Media, Influencer-Marketing, Mobile-Marketing, Rating- und Review-Management. Hierbei lernen Sie auch die wachsende Bedeutung der Brand Co-Creation kennen. Abschließend beschäftigt sich das Kapitel mit der integrierten Markenführung und dem Omnichannel-Ansatz.

According to KPMG, there was over US$210 billion invested in global FinTech with over 5684 deals in 2021 (KPMG Pulse, 2022), which doubled 2020’s numbers of US$105 billion invested in 2861 deals (KPMG Pulse, 2021). This tells us two things. First, despite COVID-19 and its many variants troubling the globe, FinTech has made its way back, strong, and square. Second, with record deals and a record amount of money invested in FinTech, it is clearer than ever that FinTech is the future for both Financial and Technology businesses in the financial services industry. For financial and technology companies to survive and thrive, they have to respond swiftly and robustly to the inevitable trend of transformation to FinTech. By studying FinTech investment deals in the past two years, we have discovered that the development trend has gone through three main phases—from payments, to embedded finance, and to Public–Private Artificial Intelligence. Along with this trend, both business practices and related investments have shown a stronger tendency of matching and focusing with clearly defined positioning that is better aligned with resources. The areas of major focus include payments, insurtech, regtech, wealthtech, blockchain and cryptocurrency, and cybersecurity. As more and more FinTech businesses have realized the value in the aforementioned areas and are promoting opening and cooperating practices, risk control has also become more important a task, not just for FinTech businesses, but for regulators as well. This is another trend in which we are witnessing growing levels of cooperation and collaboration between the public and private sectors. In summary, all recent efforts we have seen in the FinTech sector are pointing in one direction: credibility, which happens to be the basis of finance. In this chapter, we will attempt to reveal the “secret equation” which governs this money invested, as well as the targets which have attracted such large sums. Analyzing this will help us better understand how the FinTech sector has evolved and what to expect for the future.

In recent years, there has been a rising number of Americans who own cryptocurrency. Even among those who don’t, most Americans have heard of cryptocurrencies—does “bitcoin” sound familiar? If you have heard about blockchain, but you are unsure of how it works, then do not worry; you are not alone! Although blockchain may seem like an intimidating topic at first, we are here to help you become familiar with important concepts of blockchain.

Innovation is considered as a driver for growth, and it is expected that in the long-run it will improve the welfare of all. The concept of inclusive innovation emerged in response to this reality. It is particularly relevant to less developed countries. The objective of this paper is to discuss the role of business, technology and policy in supporting inclusive innovation. The methodology of the study consists in exploring the enormous potential of the Bottom of Pyramid (BoP) market and evidencing the unmet needs of consumers in BoP. The results put in evidence the opportunities for business of inclusive innovation, how the large national company conducts its business in a difficult environment, the role of multinational companies that can make more substantial investments to overcome barriers, social business undertaking inclusive innovation which need a substantial donor or government support, the non-profit sector which is currently operating in a rapidly changing environment, enablers of inclusive innovation, multinational companies technology, the role of Government policy and drawbacks of policies supporting inclusive innovation. Conclusion revel that BoP market creates many challenges to business that should be carefully navigated: very low purchasing power, lack of information, limited infrastructure and distribution challenges.

Technological developments have manifested into several dimensions within business and entrepreneurship. Internet finance (through peer-to-peer lending) is one such advancement which has developed rapidly in recent years and has also brought new challenges to financial management, investments, business financing and growth. However, the development of internet financing has also created some additional risks within the financial market. This chapter provides a literature review of the internet finance in China, particularly focusing on the discussion of online P2P lending and its contribution to business advancement. Meanwhile, it also reviews the previous literature on P2P lending in the United States and the United Kingdom. The findings of the chapter have important implications for managers and users of P2P lending platforms, and for policymakers.

During a visit to Kazakhstan in September 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced the launch of a new cross-Eurasian initiative. Nearly ten years on, approximately 140 nations have followed Kazakhstan’s lead and signed onto the multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This chapter aims to provide a concise yet critical overview of the BRI’s evolution in Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the European Union, examining the main BRI investments, strategies, and controversies over the past decade. More specifically, the chapter reflects on how individual projects under the BRI banner are coordinated and funded before examining the stated aims of the BRI. The development of two Eurasian land corridors is then explored as well as the emergent, overlapping strands of BRI discourse, including discourses on the “Human/Cultural,” “Green,” “Health,” and “Digital” Silk Roads. The chapter ends by exploring the key debates happening around China’s intentions at the state, academic, and popular levels across the Eurasian region, highlighting fears of so-called “debt-trap diplomacy.”

With the continuous improvement and growth at a rapid pace in the utility of mobile banking payment technologies, fraudulent mobile banking transactions are being multiplied using bleeding-edge technologies sharply and a significant economic loss is made every year around the world. Phishers seek new vulnerabilities with every advance in fraud prevention and have become an even more pressing issue of security challenges for banks and financial institutions. However, researchers have focused mainly on the prevention of fraudulent transactions on the online banking system. This paper proposes a new anti-phishing model for mobile banking systems at the transaction level (AntiPhiMBS-TRN) that mitigates fraudulent transactions in the mobile banking payment system. This model applies a unique id for the transactions and an application id for the bank application known to the bank, bank application, users, and the mobile banking system. In addition, AntiPhiMBS-TRN also utilizes the international mobile equipment identity (IMEI) number of the registered mobile device to prevent fraudulent transactions. Phishers cannot execute fraudulent transactions without knowing the unique id for the transaction, application id, and IMEI number of the mobile device. This paper employs a process meta language (PROMELA) to specify system descriptions and security properties and builds a verification model of AntiPhiMBS-TRN. Finally, AntiPhiMBS-TRN is successfully verified using a simple PROMELA interpreter (SPIN). The SPIN verification results prove that the proposed AntiPhiMBS-TRN is error-free, and banks can implement the verified model for mitigating fraudulent transactions in the mobile banking system globally.

This chapter attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of the ongoing technological disruption in the finance world. There is no denying that technology has already brought disruption of unprecedented scale and type in terms of bringing innovative solutions like never seen before in the financial sector. The disruptive innovation like P2P lending, Crowdfunding, Cryptocurrency, Regtech, Insurtech mobile payment, etc. has changed the way traditional financial institutions used to operate. Against such a backdrop, this chapter attempts to provide an overview of this disruption. The chapter also explores how these innovations have brought changes in the working cultures among financial institutions. The study suggests, based on the analysis of facts and figures that the disruptive technology has brought positive changes in the society in terms of delivering valuable stimulus and financial aid to the vulnerable and affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings of the study further suggest that the Fintech disruption has been a blessing in disguise for the overall growth and development of the finance community.

In this chapter, we summarize the main results and contributions of this monograph in Sect. 7.1. Then, some relevant future research directions are presented in Sect. 7.2, including wireless signal-based side-channel privacy attacks and countermeasures, liveness detection methods with accurate performance and low training burden, and misbehavior detection based on analyzing high-speed communication protocol’s traffic.

In this chapter, we focus on the security and privacy issues in the terminal device layer of smart home networks. We present WindTalker, a novel and practical keystroke inference framework that can infer the sensitive keystrokes on a mobile device through Wi-Fi-based side-channel information. WindTalker is motivated by an observation that keystrokes on mobile devices will lead to different hand coverage and finger motions, which will introduce a unique interference to the multi-path signals and can be reflected by the channel state information (CSI). WindTalker neither deploys external equipment physically close to the target device nor compromises the target device. Instead, it employs a more practical setting by deploying a free public Wi-Fi hotspot and collecting the CSI data from the target device as long as the device is connected to the hotspot. In addition, to improve inference accuracy and efficiency, it analyzes the Wi-Fi traffic to selectively collect CSI only for the sensitive period where password entering occurs. WindTalker can be implemented without the requirement of visually seeing the target device or installing any malware on the device. Furthermore, we proposed a novel CSI obfuscation countermeasure to thwart the inference attack. The evaluation results show that the performance of WindTalker can be dramatically reduced by adopting the proposed countermeasures.

The smart home network, as a typical IoT application, is becoming a popular lifestyle and has been widely deployed. In this chapter, we first introduce the smart home components following the logic of “terminal device—user interface—application platform.” Then, we elaborate on the security and privacy challenges of each component of the smart home network. Finally, we summarize the key research problems studied in this monograph.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate recent research on the effectiveness of gamification as a design strategy in the development of financial application. This paper briefly introduces the eight Octalysis gamification core drives and how applying gamified principles with the design thinking process can effectively increase user engagement and motivation for services. This paper will refer to works of literature discussing gamification found in services and will provide examples of cases where gamification was incorporated into electronic wallets. The ambition of this research will centre on the creation of electronic wallet prototypes for universal usage.

Using a case study of a unique demographic, namely, elderly female users of ICTs retired from state-owned enterprises in Xinjiang, we attempt to make a conceptual and empirical contribution to the study area of an ageing population, their use of mobile media during the COVID-19 pandemic. This contributes to the overall theme of this edited volume in examining the experience and expertise from China: the mobile way. Informed by a Deleuzian conceptualisation of assemblage, a dynamic arrangement of technologies, human agencies, and social relationships, we examine the co-shaping of mobile technologies and the agency of elderly female users in containing and coping with the COVID-19 health crisis as lived experience. With findings generated from our 16 interviews and our walk-through observation, we discovered three themes in the process of digital management and surveillance initiated from a top-down manner yet orchestrated and responded from a bottom-up fashion in China, namely, the socially supervised and assisted support, the handling of disinformation, as well as the digital engagement and privacy concerns.

This chapter examines the relevancy of value dimensions and the trustworthiness of blockchain-based mobile phone applications (BMPAs). Users shop and pay through digital wallets in the expanding metaverse by pairing blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI). The relationships discussed in this discursive chapter focused on the company’s identification and customers’ repeat usage underpinned by the means-end chain theory, social identity theory, and prospect theory. A critical review of relevant literature, predominantly from 1991 to 2021, was carried out. A research framework was formed where the second-order constructs included the hedonic value, utilitarian value, and BMPA trustworthiness. BMPA identification was mapped as the antecedent variable of repeat customers’ BMPA usage. There are three proposed control variables, namely, (1) past BMPA usage, (2) gender, and (3) age. Past studies signified that an increase in perceived hedonic value, utilitarian value, and trustworthiness was having a positive impact on a company’s identification. A favorable company’s identification leads to an increase in repeat customers’ usage. However, the relationship was observed to be indirect. Perceived risk potentially moderates the relationship between company’s identification and repeat customers’ usage negatively. Using the dimension of customer value and customer behavior, this chapter recommends a Customer Outcome Framework for businesses that adopt the BMPAs. This chapter utilizes a sum of customer value and risk factors to provide suggestions for BMPA usage based on various stakeholder perceptions.

Advances in Web 2.0 technologies have led to the wide adoption of electronic commerce platforms as an innovative shopping method to replace traditional shopping. However, due to pro-technology bias, scholars focus on technology adoption and slightly attention has been paid to the impact of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) on customers’ intention to use new online channels. This chapter addresses this gap by examining this intention through exploring the effect of eWOM on customers’ intention. In addition, this chapter will address the role of the positive and negative factors of eWOM such as affective, mishandling, and esthetics factors in social commerce.

Much of the literature has focused on marketing such as social commerce and customer intentions. We performed a literature survey and identified 73 articles that dealt with the application of the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with Artificial Neural Network (ANN) method. However, there is a gap in the literature that needs to be addressed. In this context, this research contributes to potential future work by extending the application of the mentioned techniques to more vital applied topics, such as entrepreneurship, family business, organization studies, and the health sector. This chapter describes the potential future work of SEM and ANN by highlighting issues that need to be further explored based on linear and nonlinear relations.

Barriers to using mobile payment technology are a significant impediment to users adopting new technologies. Barriers can be defined as the consumer’s opposition to any innovation. The barriers to using mobile payment technology will, therefore, be described in this chapter. Several theories that influence the adoption of mobile payment technology such as innovation resistance theory and the theory of planned behavior will be addressed.

Using mobile payment technology improves many tasks. Mobile payment technology has a high value due to the perceived benefit of such a technology. Adopting mobile payment technology increases purchasing convenience, improves customer satisfaction, and increases efficiency at checkout. However, the SEM and ANN literature has explored many of the determinants of mobile payment technology adoption such as mobile usefulness, price savings, and referent network size. This chapter contributes to describing the determinants of mobile payment and provides practitioners with insight into how to motivate customers to adopt mobile payment technology.

The goal of using the SEM approach with ANN is to capture linear and non-compensated relationships. However, there are many shortcomings in understanding the mechanism of application of such techniques. Therefore, this chapter describes the concept of the SEM method and the concept of ANN. Hence, an insight into how to adopt the ANN method with SEM will be provided. Finally, the discussion and conclusion of this chapter will be addressed.

Despite the fact that scholars have identified blockchain technology as a powerful tool that can facilitate financial inclusion and empower marginalized people, there is a lack of research regarding its use amongst women, specifically women micro-entrepreneurs. This criticism lends itself to the issue of gender imbalances and inequality in some sections of IT/IS. This study aims to determine the benefits, risks and challenges associated with using blockchain technology for empowering women micro-entrepreneurs. A qualitative research strategy was adopted by using an interview approach, and data collection which focused on the perspectives of professionals employed in the blockchain sector.Using an affordance lens as a guideline, the findings and analysis from the interviews show that blockchain technology both directly and indirectly affords financial inclusion amongst women micro-entrepreneurs in particularly access to financial products and services to promote active participation. We found that many participants motivated that a blockchain solution will not be feasible in the context of a single micro-entrepreneur, but that women should form a network where they will be able to support each other and benefit from economies of scale.

The purpose of this study is to understand how sociotechnical factors shape the development of electronic government payment portal in developing countries. E-Government research on payment has focused more on post development phases such as adoption, implementation and use. As a result, little is known about the development phases. To address this research gap, this study focuses on the design and development of an electronic government payment portal in a developing economy. The study employs dialectic process theory as an analytical lens and qualitative interpretive case study as methodology. Findings show that social challenges such as a contradictory requirements of stakeholders, frequent interferences with the development process and technical challenges such as lack of consensus on development tools, lack of relevant ICT skills in the public sector and the use of a rigid software development methodology influenced the development process. The conclusion offers implication for research, practice and policy as well as recommendations for future research.

The importance of digital transformation for banks has been recently stressed by many researchers. However, banks are perceived as traditional market players that are relied on robust infrastructure and rigid internal procedures. Apart from market competition imposed by innovative market players, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed to be strong external driver for digitalization in financial industry. The objective of this study is to examine how COVID-19 pandemic is influencing digitalization of Serbian banking industry. The research methodology is based on management tool of Canvas Business Model. The results show that communication channels were the most affected and evolved from traditional such as branches to digital communication channels such as websites, social networks, and online applications. Employees and IT infrastructure turn to be the most important resources while COVID-19 had no significant influence on key business activities, customer segmentation, cost structure and revenue stream. Finally, we elaborate research limitations and use research results to formulate potential directions for future research.

At Dartmouth College in the United States in 1956, John McCarthy and other scientists began to explore the use of machines to mimic human learning skills.

The widespread digitalization has globally changed the sphere of cash payments and settlements, created the conditions for them to constantly become simpler, faster, and more convenient for users. At the same time, it provided opportunities for the emergence and distribution of completely new payment instruments based on digital technologies. The digital tools gained the most ground in the field of payments for individuals. This article contains an analysis of the main trends and prospects for the development of the retail payment instruments sphere, their positive and negative impact on various sectors of the economy and user behavior. The purpose of the study is to identify the key factors that currently determine the spread and development of various payment instruments and that will determine their development in the future. The importance and relevance of the study are determined by the fact that it was conducted in the Russian Federation on the eve of the implementation of a pilot project for the use of the digital ruble and the participants in the study were respondents closely related to the field of economics and finance. The collection of materials for analysis was carried out in a large Russian city—St. Petersburg, where many significant financial institutions are located. Google form features were used for data collection. The received materials were analyzed and systematized; the corresponding conclusions were drawn according to the results.

Multi-purpose Messaging Mobile App (MMMA) combines several functionalities in a single APP to provide integrated service that brings tremendous convenience to users. Therefore, MMMAs become more and more popular. However, the prevalence of MMMAs also makes them a hotbed for cybercrime. Among them, “Click Farming” fraud requires special attention, as it causes substantial pecuniary losses and is challenging to detect. In this paper, we describe Multi-view Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network (MHT-GNN), a framework for detecting “Click Farming” fraudsters in a popular MMMA called WeChat. We first adopt a Heterogeneous Temporal Graph (HTG) to model spatial, heterogeneous and temporal information contained in MM-MA data. We then extract two different types of user history sequences as two “views” of user behavior patterns from HTG. MHT-GNN contains a pretraining phase and a detection phase. The main components in MHT-GNN include Inductive Heterogeneous GNN Encoder, Temporal Snapshot Sequence Encoder, and User Relation Sequence Encoder. The first encoder aims to capture spatial information and the heterogeneity in each snapshot of HTG. The later two encoders are designed to incorporate temporal information to better reveal user’s behavior patterns and MHT-GNN leverages them to capture the two different views of user history behavior data. We conduct experiments on a real-world, million-scale dynamic graph extracted from WeChat. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MHT-GNN: it significantly exceeds existing detection methods, and it is able to block “Click Farming” fraud activities.

Today’s societal digitization continues to advance at exponential speeds driven by technology trends. Billions of Internet of Things devices have made their way into our daily lives but also into healthcare, manufacturing, and supply chains. In contrast, the financial sector still largely operates on legacy infrastructures, where merchants receive their payments long after they released the digital/physical good to the consumer. In addition, the emergence of Decentralized Finance through blockchain technology, and the accumulation of data in private silos, has demonstrated a capacity to impact national sovereignty and monetary transmission channels. Against this backdrop, many central banks have recently started to research and test the issuance of digitally native fiat money—or Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)—in an effort to redesign the essence and use of physical cash. CBDCs present a broad variety of designs, which translate into manifold techno-legal and standardization policy questions. In this context, this chapter surveys the state-of-the art with specific focus on “retail” CBDCs. In doing so, it provides an overview of candidate architectures, heeds legal impacts and regulatory compliance issues, presents a set of case studies and touches upon cross-border CBDC challenges.

In keeping with trends in modern tax administration, the colonial tax administrator model should be replaced by a functional structure of the administration to minimize contacts with taxpayers and limit rent-seeking and corruption opportunities. The area-based model with a focus on occupancy is much easier to administer than the value-based model, although a cadaster might still be needed for legal purposes and for business properties. High-tech satellite imagery, with low-tech verification show promise even in less developed countries, and blockchain would make a big difference in recording transactions, revenues generated as well as enhancing local public financial management options. Blockchain creates an immutable public registry not under control of any single agent, and is a powerful instrument for improving the management of data in the public sector, and also for registering property ownership and sales.

First, this chapter analyzes the application scope and application value of blockchain in six financial fields, including cross-border payment, cross-border trade, supply chain, financing, insurance, and credit reporting, and emphasizes that blockchain has security, Query A credible and efficient advantage. Then, this chapter introduces and analyzes the application trends of blockchain in the financial field of 5 continents including America, Europe, Asia, Oceania and Africa, and focuses on the detailed description of the application of blockchain in China’s financial field by the broad and deep trend. Finally, as an application example, this chapter describes in detail the business pain points, application progress and implementation cases in the fields of digital currency, financial trading market, and supply chain finance.

Energy inclusion is a major concern in Tanzania, where rural areas are widely lacking access to both power networks and off-grid systems. Different barriers are slowing the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 7: universal electrification in the country raises concerns in delays and equity. Financial exclusion adds to the complexity of adopting appropriate technological solutions, particularly for rural communities. Solar photovoltaic solutions represent an opportunity to increase energy access and enable growth. The introduction of new technological products requires to establish local power markets, including demand, financial resources and providers, supply mechanisms and after-sale services. The financing of renewable energy solutions for rural households partially relies on microfinance institutions and community financial groups. Technology suppliers are also providing financial services to expand access to solar and photovoltaic products, applying models mostly enabled by mobile payment systems. The paper assesses the effects of an initiative implemented in Malinyi and Kilombero districts to support the establishment of local solar power markets. The involvement of Village Community Banks to engage communities and develop sustainable financial schemes is evaluated, together with the complexity of combining awareness raising on technological solutions and financial education. Results of the implementation are presented and discussed evaluating the different ingredients of the established markets.

The transition to “SDG7 -modern and sustainable energy for all” may reconfigure the lives of citizens who live “outside the grid” in the rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa. The decentralization approach for developing renewable energy in sub-Saharan Africa has constantly been promoted as a means to rural electrification. This paper reviews the barriers to private sector participation in decentralized electrification projects and the solutions that have been proposed and implemented. It is not only the economic approaches that are analysed but also some of the solutions or drivers that have contributed to rural electrification. There are specific technological pathways which have proven fruitful in sub-Saharan Africa that are unique to its economic and demographic settings and that otherwise would not be adopted or used in developed countries. This paper finally analyses these technological pathways with the objective of matching the drivers and obstacles to potential solutions. Long term energy planning with the integration of regional power pools is instrumental to reduce CAPEX as well as to increase the market size. Blended financing together with already working technologies such as pay-as-you-go, and mobile money will be the pillars to meeting SDG7 goals.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book, identifies different perspectives, and describes the different sections of the book in more detail. It places the research issues in the context of the “great socio-ecological transformation” and defines different elements of this process. The chapter also includes the main take-away messages from subsequent book chapters.

Die Entwicklung und Verbreitung des Internets haben wirtschaftlich und gesellschaftlich einen Wandel angestoßen, der seinesgleichen sucht. Insbesondere das Smartphone, respektive mobile Endgeräte im Allgemeinen, haben die Art und Weise der Kommunikation sowie des Konsums nachhaltig verändert. Hierbei kommt der damit einhergehenden ubiquitären Verfügbarkeit von Informationen eine zentrale Bedeutung zu. Konsumenten sind nunmehr in der Lage, unabhängig von Standort und Zeit auf Produkte und Dienstleistungen zuzugreifen – dieser technologieinduzierte Wandel des Konsumentenverhaltens übt maßgeblichen Einfluss auf das Rollenverständnis bzw. die Daseinsberechtigung des klassischen stationären Handels aus. An dieser Stelle stellt sich somit auf der einen Seite die Frage, inwiefern sich der technologische Wandel auf das Konsumentenverhalten auswirkt, und auf der anderen Seite, welche Konsequenzen sich daraus für den Handel, hier am Beispiel der Do-it-yourself-Branche, ergeben.

This chapter shows how digital financial inclusion is helping people make the transition from the informal financial market to the formal financial system. Specifically, the chapter focuses on how digital financial inclusion is assisting people in making the shift. The connection between digital finance and financial inclusion is based on the idea that a sizeable portion of the population that is excluded has access to a mobile phone, and that the delivery of financial services via mobile phones and other related digital devices is enhancing access to finance for people who were previously excluded, such as the underprivileged, women, and youth. This enables these individuals to move from an unregulated money market to a regulated financial market, which in turn allow them to transition from being financially excluded to being financially included.

This chapter discusses what it means to have digital financial inclusion in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The term “digital financial inclusion” is defined as the utilization of low-cost digital tools to offer formal financial services to demographic groups that are underserved or financially excluded. One approach to characterize it is for the excluded or underserved individuals having broad access to and usage of formal financial services through digital means. This chapter is premised on the assumption that talks about how to encourage those at the base of the economicEconomics pyramid to engage in the financial activity must increasingly address the importance of digital financial inclusion. This idea is the premise upon which this chapter is built. The chapter goes into detail about the tools and the many different components of digital financial inclusion. It also goes over the many instruments that are used for digital financial inclusion. The chapter discusses not only the function of digital financial services but also the providers of those services.

With the progress of science and technology, Machine Learning has made great progress in the financial service industry. Its wide application in all aspects of finance makes it have a great impact on financial markets, financial institutions, and financial supervision. By summarizing the application of Machine Learning in the financial industry and taking Alpha Portfolio research as an example, this paper focuses on the opportunities and challenges faced by the application of Machine Learning in the financial industry.

It is very important to give full play to the powerful accelerator and multiplier of informatization through the construction of smart transport hubs to improve the integration level of regional transportation and the quality of passenger travel service. However, Our country is currently in a period of economic structural adjustment, financial constraints, limited financial support for the informatization construction of integrated passenger transportation hub, so it is urgent to build a set of scientific and effective evaluation system for the investment benefits of informatization of integrated passenger transportation hub. Given the prominent problems existing in the current construction of smart transportation hub such as the low application level of information system, waste of resources, poor investment effect, the paper selects 15 indicators to evaluate the effect of information construction from six aspects, including investment scale, perception system, operation decision, emergency command, passenger service, and benefit reflection. On this basis, the paper introduces the data envelopment analysis method to construct the investment benefit evaluation model for information construction of integrated passenger transportation hub, and finally gives the solution idea of the model. The research has guiding significance and practical application value for the informatization project planning, construction, and investment effect evaluation of our country's integrated passenger transportation hub. Meanwhile, it can effectively avoid the waste of resources in the process of information construction.

Mobile Financial Services (MFS) allows consumers to conduct financial transactions using their mobile devices. In Bangladesh, most of the population uses mobile phones whereas most of them are digitally illiterate. So, the objective of this research was to evaluate the usability of existing MFS applications. To attain this objective, the six most extensively used mobile banking applications in Bangladesh (bKash, Nagad, Rocket, SureCash, Upay, and Tap) were selected, and they were evaluated using Bertini et al.’s heuristics and user study. As the outcome, four issues are found to be widespread, while there are unique usability issues with each programme. Five major sections were created out of all the identified issues, and each section’s design issues were solved. Finally, the evaluation’s findings were used to create the design requirements for each application.

Nowadays, rapid development in information technologies has been experienced in the aviationAviation industry as in other industries. This development has affected both passengers and airlinesAirline in different aspects. The use of information technologies enables passengers to carry out flight-related transactions more easily and quickly, without place and time constraints. Information technologies have necessitated the use of different applications in the marketingMarketing activities of airlines. So in terms of airlinesAirline, it is extremely important to adapt these information technologies to all processes in order to achieve sustainable competitive advantageCompetitive advantage. Today airlines have also started to use mobile applicationsMobile application (mobile apps) in their marketingMarketing activities. They encourage their passengers to use these apps, which require great investment. However, some passengers may avoid using mobile apps due to a variety of reasons such as technology anxietyTechnology anxiety, privacy concernsPrivacy concern, complexity, etc. In this case, high investments made for the development of these apps may not be compensated and the competitiveness of airlinesAirline may be weakened. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to determine the factors affecting passengers’ avoidance of using airlines’ mobile apps. A survey was conducted using a face-to-face interview technique with convenience sampling method to collect data. Questionnaire items were measured by a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The survey was conducted in the two busiest airports in TurkeyTurkey (Atatürk and Sabiha Gökçen Airports in Istanbul). A total of 450 respondents have been reached but 400 valid questionnaires were analyzed by using Partial Least SquaresPartial Least Squares (PLS-SEM) method. A pilot study was conducted on 20 volunteer participants before the field research was initiated. In this context, the questionnaire was finalized by taking into consideration the suggestions expressed in order to maintain the coherence. The survey questionnaire consisted of two sections. The first section comprised of perceived irritationPerceived irritation, perceived lack of utilityPerceived lack of utility, perceived lack of incentivePerceived lack of incentive, technology anxietyTechnology anxiety, privacy concernPrivacy concern, and mobile app usage avoidanceUsage avoidance. In the second section, there were questions about passenger’s demographic characteristics such as; age, gender, education level, average income level, and flight frequency. Respondents were also asked about their general usage related to smartphonesSmartphone and mobile apps. According to the results; perceived irritationPerceived irritation, perceived lack of utilityPerceived lack of utility, perceived lack of incentivePerceived lack of incentive, technology anxietyTechnology anxiety, and privacy concernsPrivacy concern have a positive and significant effect on mobile app usage avoidanceUsage avoidance. Among these variables, technology anxietyTechnology anxiety is the most affected variable on passengers’ avoidance of using mobile apps. Both in national and international literature, there are numerous studies on mobile internet, apps adoption, and actual usage of mobile apps in different industries. Previous studies are especially related to the factors accepting the mobile apps. In addition to this, there are limited studies including avoidance of using airlineAirline mobile apps. In aviationAviation industry also, there are a few studies both national and international literature on passengers’ avoidance of using airlineAirline mobile apps. Therefore, this study will be one of the few studies both shedding light on literature and airlinesAirline to increase the use of mobile apps.

This chapter examines WeChat users’ everyday news participation on this most popular social media platform in China against public sphere norms identified in Chap. 2 and asserts that those participations constitute chronic online news-prompted public spheres in China. It advances the argument in two steps. First, it examines the basic conditions needed for constellations of news-prompted public spheres on WeChat: availability of public spaces and continuous news provision. It also studies WeChat affordances that enable users’ news engagement. During this process, the speech freedom requirement and the procedural equality requirement are addressed. Second, I then assess whether and to what extent those users’ engagement in news in the comment zones curated by news media on WeChat fulfils the other four normative constructs of public spheres: the public spirit, reflexivity, relevance and the “tolerance of difference” norms. The analysis shows that although constrained, many of the news-prompted chronic gatherings on WeChat were publicly oriented and pertinent, and often reflexive and diverse, as expected by the public sphere ideal.

This chapter presents the discussion on the technology applied in the hotel sector in the new norm for hotels’ operation around the world. Various studies have been conducted to report the latest hotel’s technology trends and innovation to sustain competitive advantage. Therefore, this chapter offers light on the recent transformation, development, as well as the application of various technological advancement, to replace human labor in the hotel sector. Further, this chapter presents the application of these technologies in several departments in the hotel sector. This chapter offers a significant view on the strategies that hotels are implementing in using technology to transform their communication medium, financial transaction, food and beverage operations, marketing, and promotional tools, as well as the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in hotel’s service delivery to replace human labor. The impact of the technology application in the hotel sector is also discussed at the end of this chapter.

Airport business has been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic with travel ban, closed borders and the “new norm” of some standard operating procedures. The implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on airports have driven the adoption of technology that offers value for optimising operations as an approach to airports reopening within the new norm. The purpose of this study is to explore the feasibility of technology adoption in assisting airport industry on the road to recovery following the COVID-19 crisis. It investigates the adoption of technology by airports and its benefits in assisting airports reopening and operations recovery. For this study, a total of 33 literatures on technology adoption by airports between the year of 2020 to 2021 were reviewed. The findings indicated that airports will benefit from adopting three major areas of technology: Artificial Intelligence, biometrics, and the Internet of Things. These technologies benefit airports in a variety of ways such as cost-effectiveness, crowd control, improved efficiency, enhanced passenger experience, reduced contact, improved safety and security, time savings, and assistance for airport workers. Technological adoption in airport operations, on the road to recovery following the COVID-19 crisis, can contribute to the overall perception and distinctiveness of airports, as well as the acceptance of technology.

Mobile payments are rapidly taking over the market with their convenience and speed, creating new payment and profit models for consumers and organizations. While they are beneficial the adoption is still at the infancy. On this basis, this study combines consumers’ perceived risk (e.g., affective risk and performance risk) and consumers’ perceived value (e.g., economic value, emotional value, function value, social value) as second-order constructs with ease of use to study on the willingness of consumer to use mobile payment. Results indicate that all the hypotheses are supported in this study. The research enriches the literatures of mobile payment and deepens the understanding of mobile payment usage from a developing country perspective.

Recently, with the widespread application of mobile communication devices, fingerprint identification is the most prevalent in all types of mobile computing. While they bring a huge convenience to our lives, the resulting security and privacy issues have caused widespread concern. Fraudulent attack using forged fingerprint is one of the typical attacks to realize illegal intrusion. Thus, fingerprint liveness detection (FLD) for True or Fake fingerprints is very essential. This paper proposes a novel fingerprint liveness detection method based on broad learning with uniform local binary pattern (ULBP). Compared to convolutional neural networks (CNN), training time is drastically reduced. Firstly, the region of interest of the fingerprint image is extracted to remove redundant information. Secondly, texture features in fingerprint images are extracted via ULBP descriptors as the input to the broad learning system (BLS). ULBP reduces the variety of binary patterns of fingerprint features without losing any key information. Finally, the extracted features are fed into the BLS for training. The BLS is a flat network, which transfers and places the original input as a mapped feature in feature nodes, generalizing the structure in augmentation nodes. Experiments show that in Livdet 2011 and Livdet 2013 datasets, the average training time is about 1 s and the performance of identifying real and fake fingerprints is effect. Compared to other advanced models, our method is faster and more miniature.

The changes brought to retail as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic have forced an adjustment in consumer shopping behaviour. In addition to keeping distance, wearing masks, gloves and using disinfectant fluids, buyers were asked to forgo paying for the purchases with cash and use payment cards or mobile devices. The purpose of this paper is to identify similarities and differences in payments for grocery purchases in stationary retail shops during the COVID-19 pandemic by two consumer age cohorts, generations X and Y (Millennials). To compare the payment behaviour of the two generations, a CAWI survey was conducted during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey sample consisted of 650 individuals. Based on the variables for the three forms of payment (cash, payment cards and mobile payments), that buyers made in five types of shops (discount, supermarket, hypermarket, convenience shop and branch shops such as bakery and retail vegetable/fruit supply), a cluster analysis (Ward's method) was conducted. Four types of consumers were identified in each generation. The following similarities were found in payment behaviour in stationary retail outlets: In both generations, consumers most often pay for purchases by card and in each of them, a group using this form of payment almost exclusively can be distinguished. In contrast to Generation Y, otherwise known as the Millennials, Generation X includes customers who most often pay for the purchases in cash. Among Millennials, on the other hand, it is possible to identify consumers who prefer to use mobile payments and occasionally pay in cash.

Especially in comparison to online retail, there is no denying that times have become more difficult for stationary retail: Stationary retailers are increasingly struggling with declining customer footfall and stagnating sales, while online retail has been able to grow enormously and become a growth driver for the entire retail industry. The unchecked shift from offline to online poses a central threat to stationary retail. This results from the increasing digitalization, which already determines a large part of everyday life and thus consumer behavior and customer expectations. It is also changing the demands on experience orientation and service. But the internationalization and “platformization” of retail is also putting considerable pressure on traditional retailers, especially since many of them are still refusing to undergo a digital transformation. To make matters worse, in the wake of increasing vacancies as well as changing mobility, the role of city centers is also changing, making them less dependent on retail. The new survival formula is called “customer centricity”, which, however, only works digitally based.

In smart retail, there are five central issues that will shape the retail of the future. First and foremost, the basic prerequisites must be created that enable data-based working. This in turn allows the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and thus customer data-based one-to-one marketing. In order to be able to work with this at all, intelligent employee qualification and recruitment is required. Qualified employees are also needed for a digital supply chain as well as future-proof business modeling including the development of smart stores. Digital-based stores also enable digitalized shopping centers. In the end, it’s all about “channel no matter” as the highest evolutionary stage of stationary retail.

Deepening the reform of innovation and entrepreneurship (In.&En.) education in colleges is an effective measure to promote the comprehensive reform of higher education and enhance the competitiveness of college graduates in entrepreneurship and employment. The following factors are proposed to effectively improve the innovation and entrepreneurial enthusiasm of computer students: Firstly, promoting In.&En. in the “Internet +” era as an opportunity, combined with professional computer training. Secondly, establishing an In.&En. curriculum system, alongside student innovation and technology groups based on “Internet +”. In addition, implementing college students’ In.&En. Competition plans, alongside integrating the four aspects of the entrepreneurial practice platform both internally and externally within schools. The final factor is the dual-creation computer talent training model in the “Internet +”.

With the booming development of information technologies, internet and digital, China has a sustainable growth in terms of e-commerce, new retail, mobile payment, logistics. China’s online consumption has grown substantially, effectively meeting people’s daily needs and helping to promote steady economic development. This study is aimed to explore and research the consumers’ intention and experience of shipping online, combining with the questionnaires analysis. The two factors, perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment, were selected to study that affects the intention of purchasing online. Analyzed with the Reliability and Validity, path coefficients and regression analysis, the results reveal that usefulness and enjoyment are the factors influencing customer’s intention when they purchase the products online. Understanding the individual consumers’ online shopping behavior is the significant factor to promote sale. This study could help the manager of the enterprise and network retailers to develop effective measures to attract consumers to purchase their product.

Commencing by defining retailing and the retail industry, the chapter then describes the classifications, components, and formats/ channels of the retailing industry. A further description of the grocery Supermarket retailing with the nuances of the emerging market countries and Ghana as an example is also outlined. We then present contemporary retail marketing in supermarkets and explain in detail the retail marketing mix in the grocery supermarket chains. The nature and dynamics within grocery retailing communication and promotions are covered alongside content on advertising and promotions with the nuances of emerging market countries. A detailed discussion on contemporary retail marketing akin to relationship marketing is elucidated. Finally, the emerging but significant role of supermarket loyalty programmes in grocery retail marketing is covered.

Ghana as an emerging economy has made strides in the development of infrastructure in general and especially the infrastructure that has profound effects on driving marketing in the Supermarket retail industry. The opportunities and path for further development of digital marketing and online marketing using the internet and the various services of increasing service options of television providing new alternatives to the traditional marketing of Supermarkets. Also, the improving and increasing availability of internet networks and the mobile telephone penetration in the population provide opportunities for mobile phone application development and usage in leveraging mobile payment systems to enhance transactions in retailing and Supermarket retailing chains. Other opportunities such as the current availability of cheaper RFID-based based applications enhance commerce with the provision of contactless smart cards and identification to enhance Supermarket chain operations with cutting-edge payment systems and invention systems. The traditional media offers possibilities for supermarket advertising and marketing communications through outdoor and indoor advertising infrastructure. The development of the Ghana Digital Addressing system has the potential to enhance commerce in supermarket chains and provide a drive for the effective implementation of loyalty schemes.

This chapter highlights the importance of digital technologies in managing mega risks—both the coronavirus pandemic and climate crisis. During the pandemic, the technology provided a lifeline to cities when physical contacts became minimal due to lockdown and social distancing measures. Besides rescuing city functions, they brought forward unparalleled and multiple benefits ranging from urban health surveillance and use of digital health to remote operations in the conduct of public administration, education, and shopping; organization of events, meetings, conferences, and webinars; delivering relief; and maintaining communication with the public. Regarding climate change, this chapter presents proven application of technology in monitoring, mitigation, adaptation, and early warning on climate-related hazards as well as disaster management. The innovative applications of technology enabled health surveillance, reduced transaction time, helped in making the system robust, and brought economic efficiency in physical space in offices, factories, healthcare facilities, public and civic buildings. A logical outcome of the above was a massive increase in internet-based services. Apart from a few glitches, the resilience shown in the collective sense was admirable. While showing the benefits of technology, this chapter also brings forward shortcomings and gaps in their usage, management, and governance that need mitigation. Among these were digital divide; infringement of privacy and personal autonomy; cyber insecurity; threat of misinformation; and environmental footprint from the use of digital technology.

This article overviews the policy initiatives, progress, and issues of China’s digitalization. China’s digital economy has been growing quickly since the end of the 2000s, and data from the users of internet-based payment technologies indicate China has a high rate of use of digital services compared to other nations with similar levels of economic development. The Chinese government has setup a variety of policy initiative related to digitalization. A potential risk of digitalization is the impact on labor market. Considering the impact of automation, jobs in rural areas and relatively elderly workers may be replaced by future innovations. In addition, digitalization plays the role of strengthening China’s authoritarian regime, and it is important to note that a similar pattern is also taking place in some other countries. Chinese ICT companies are eager to expand their activities in both domestic and foreign territories, and their investments in unicorn companies in Southeast Asia are especially noteworthy.

With the development of online applications based on the social network, many different approaches of service to achieve these applications have emerged. Users’ reporting and sharing of their consumption experience or opinion can be utilized to rate the quality of different approaches of online services. How to ensure the authenticity of the users’ reports and identify malicious ones with cheating reports become important issues to achieve an accurate service rating. In this chapter, we provide a private-prior peer prediction mechanism based trustworthy service rating system with a data processing center (DPC), which requires users to report to it with their prior and posterior believes that their peer users will report a high quality opinion of the service. The DPC evaluates users’ trustworthiness with their reports by applying the strictly proper scoring rule, and removes reports received from users with low trustworthiness from the service rating procedure. This peer prediction method is incentive compatible and able to motivate users to report honestly. In addition, to identify malicious users and bad-functioning/unreliable users with high error rate of quality judgement, an unreliability index is proposed in this chapter to evaluate the uncertainty of reports. Reports with high unreliability values will also be excluded from the service rating system. By combining the trustworthiness and unreliability, malicious users will face a dilemma that they cannot receive a high trustworthiness and low unreliability at the same time when they report falsely. Simulation results indicate that the proposed peer prediction based trustworthy service rating can identify malicious and unreliable behaviours effectively, and motivate users to report truthfully. The relatively high service rating accuracy can be achieved by the proposed system.

This chapter examines the influence of culture on the use of digital assets. Based on relevant data from the World Bank database, we examine the relationship between financial institutional development and the use of digital assets. Using four ways to measure the use of digital assets: digital payments, mobile payments, using the internet to pay bills, and online shopping, we find that financial institution development is positively related to each measure of the use of digital assets. We then investigate how national culture may play a role in digital asset use. Using Hofstede’s definitions of cultural dimensions and the World Value Survey results, we identify that the traits of “individualism” and “trust” are positively related to the increased use of digital assets. Overall, these results suggest that the use of digital assets in a country relates to the national development of financial institutions as well as national cultural traits.

The main problem is that China’s financial market is under excessive government regulation and operates as a state-owned monopoly with strong access barriers. This distorts financial resource allocation, makes it difficult and expensive to finance medium-sized and small private enterprises, and leads to industrial hollowing-out. It is thus imperative to intensify China’s reform and opening-up.

Das Kapitel 3 befasst sich mit dem ersten Erfolgsfaktor eines jeden zu gründenden Unternehmens für die Phase der Ideenformulierung: dem Gründer bzw. dem Gründerteam und dessen bzw. deren Beschreibung im Rahmen der Erstellung eines Businessplans. Durch diesen Businessplan erfährt die Gründungsidee eine schriftliche Formulierung bzw. Darstellung. Entsprechend sind die nachfolgenden Punkte Bestandteile dieses Plans. Dabei stehen folgende Fragen für den Faktor „Management“ im Mittelpunkt der Betrachtungen, deren Antworten zugleich auch die Lernziele darstellen: Welche allgemeinen Informationen müssen zu den Gründern hinsichtlich deren Qualifikation und Vision im Rahmen eines Businessplans gemacht werden? Wie sieht die Aufgaben- bzw. Rollenverteilung zwischen den Gründern aus und welche Beteiligungsverhältnisse liegen vor? Wie gestaltet sich die Organisation innerhalb des Gründerteams und welche Regeln gilt es hierbei zu beachten?

Unternehmensgründungen spielen für die gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Entwicklung eines Landes eine herausragende Rolle. Hintergrund ist die Tatsache, dass mit jeder Gründung ein neuer Marktteilnehmer entsteht, der stimulierend auf den Wettbewerb wirkt und hierdurch die wirtschaftliche Dynamik weiter vorantreibt. Das neue Unternehmen fragt dabei am Markt bestimmte Ressourcen nach (z. B. Arbeitskräfte und Material) und bietet – nach einer Verwendung dieser Ressourcen im Rahmen innerbetrieblicher Produktions- und Arbeitsprozesse – dem Markt wiederum seine Produkte bzw. Dienstleistungen als Ergebnis an. Durch dieses Kernprinzip wird die Funktionsfähigkeit einer Ökonomie sichergestellt. Sowohl in der Wissenschaft als gerade auch in der Politik ist der Stellenwert von Unternehmensgründungen daher unstrittig. Mit jedem neuen Unternehmen wird die Hoffnung verbunden, dass hierdurch neue Arbeitsplätze geschaffen werden und der technische Fortschritt über Innovationen sichergestellt wird. Entsprechend repräsentieren Unternehmensgründungen eine wesentliche Triebfeder einer dynamischen Wirtschaft und begründen somit u. a. den Prozess von Marktwachstum und -wandel. Es ist nicht verwunderlich, wenn in politischen und wirtschaftlichen Diskussionen immer wieder auf die Bedeutung von Unternehmensgründungen für die konjunkturelle Entwicklung im nationalen und die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit im internationalen Bereich hingewiesen wird.

Das Zahlungsverkehrsgeschäft hat aus Sicht der Kreditinstitute eine hohe geschäftspolitische Relevanz, da geschäftsfähige natürliche oder juristische Personen i. d. R. am Zahlungsverkehr teilnehmen (müssen). Deshalb bestimmt das Zahlungskontengesetz (ZKG) mit der Umsetzung der europäischen Zahlungskontenrichtlinie seit 2016, dass in Deutschland jeder Verbraucher bonitätsunabhängig ein Recht auf ein Zahlungskonto mit grundlegenden Funktionen hat (Basiskonto). Der Kosten- und Rationalisierungsdruck von Seiten der Kreditinstitute ist seit Jahren hoch – andererseits können aus Kontoumsatzinformationen neue Geschäftsansätze abgeleitet werden. Obgleich Bargeld in Deutschland noch die meistgenutzte Zahlungsform ist, gewinnen bargeldlose Zahlungsformen zunehmend an Bedeutung. Bei den bargeldlosen Zahlungsinstrumenten wird die Debitkarte (Girocard – vormals ec-Karte) am häufigsten verwendet.

Die Zunahme bankbetrieblicher Komplexität hat zahlreiche Ursachen. So resultieren aus einer fortschreitenden Globalisierung die Notwendigkeit regelmäßiger Anpassungen und ein kontinuierlicher Wandel der Institute im Wettbewerb.Darüber hinaus sehen die Kreditinstitute sich konfrontiert mit dynamischen Veränderungen durch Entwicklungen der Digitalisierung/Technisierung sowie mit zunehmend differenzierten Kundenbedürfnissen und -anforderungen, die seit der Finanzkrise im Jahr 2007 einhergehen mit deutlich erhöhten regulatorischen Rahmenbedingungen von Seiten der Bankenaufsicht und einer veränderten politischen und gesellschaftlichen Sicht auf die Kreditwirtschaft im Allgemeinen. Insbesondere Kreditinstitute mit bankbetrieblichen Aktivitäten in der BRD werden dabei zusätzlich auch durch demografische Veränderungen in ihrem Geschäftsmodell berührt. Das Management der Kreditinstitute steht insofern in einem dauerhaften Spannungsfeld unterschiedlichster Anforderungen, das eigene Institut strategisch richtig zu positionieren.

Aiming at the problems of strong coupling, low efficiency and poor flexibility of the traditional expressway toll system, a new expressway toll system based on the “Cloud Wan Edge Terminal (CWET)" architecture is designed which builds computing, storage and APP centers on the cloud. The highway data are transmitted to the cloud through the SD-WAN network, and develops the edge operating system which realize the ubiquitous interconnection of all kinds of toll system terminals. The new toll collection system has achieved good results in the application of Jiangsu Expressway.

In recent years, modern communication and internet technologies have been rapidly upgraded. Under this background, the protection of citizens’ personal information is facing more severe challenges. At present, the phenomenon of stealing citizens’ personal information through network means and then implementing new network fraud emerges one after another, and other related criminal phenomena are also frequent, causing great harm to citizens and even society. It is necessary to punish the violation of citizens’ personal information from the perspective of criminal law to reduce the risk of online fraud caused by the disclosure of personal information, and then realize the effective prevention of various types of related crimes. From the perspective of new online fraud, this paper focuses on the criminal law protection of citizens’ personal information, analyzes and explores the deficiencies under the current legal system and puts forward corresponding countermeasures to curb the new online fraud crime, safeguard people’s property safety and restore social stability.

This research studies the cited literature on electronic word of mouth (eWOM) in consumer behavior and assesses the gap for future research. The bibliometric review assesses 94 research papers of which 65 were relevant in order to understand the concept of online reviews, its antecedents, the industry and their influences on the buyers. The growth in the literature is analyzed by the search result extraction, using the software VOSviewer to ascertain the bibliometric mapping. The analysis revealed that there has been a significant rise in the documents written on this topic from the past few years. The USA has 24 documents out of 65 of Scopus database consisting of 207 citations; China being one of the highest online buyers has 23 publications to its credit, with India having 7 papers. The connection between online reviews and websites, purchase intention, information source is missing which can be ascertained as the gap in the keywords. This paper is an attempt to consolidate the researches which will contribute in the academic literature and provide an insight to the researchers and marketers who are interested in the industry-wise purchase intention of the consumers getting influenced by eWOM to devise their marketing strategy with respect to eWOM. The study reveals the suggestive plan for research and highlights the gap and the possibility of expanding the eWOM literature.

In this chapter, we will present cases of two reputable social media giants, Facebook and WeChat, in order to discern how social media companies monetize their social business. We will explain how monetization strategy and monetization actions are used and geared toward generating revenue and conclude with what we can learn from the two cases.

Social media advertising comprises a major revenue source for many large social media platforms. The Interactive Advertising Bureau defines social media advertising as “an online ad that incorporates user interactions that the consumer has agreed to display and be shared. The resulting ad displays these interactions along with the user’s persona (picture and/or name) within the ad content (see Chu, Journal of Interactive Advertising, 12(1), 32, 2011).” Social media advertising is quite different from traditional mass media advertising. Social media advertising incorporates more social elements in the advertising process. Social media ads can be interactive, immersive, and influential when social media users are browsing social media content. Social media users can comment, distribute, and like social ads. Social media ads can also be presented in an organic form which looks similar to regular social content displayed in users’ online social circles.

Social media is gaining momentum in generating commercial value. This book examines how economic agents (brands, firms, and social media platforms) make money using social media platforms. Though a handful of researchers and practitioners have studied several aspects related to social media monetization, their contributions are largely limited by their strategic focus on a particular economic agent or a certain research context.

This chapter introduces key aspects of social media monetization. From a network perspective, the value of social media relies on the number of social media users. The more users a social media platform has, the more attractive it is for advertisers, brands, and other business users. This explains why daily active users (DAUs) are so important for defining the popularity of social media. A significant number of users offer a solid base for a social media platform to profit and optimize monetization.

The basic concept of dynamic pricing (DP) has been around for a long time (e.g., gas station prices). To maximize profit, it is now commonly known as an algorithm-based automatic price adjustment tool on eCommerce platforms (e.g., flight tickets or hotel prices). DP is based on time or demand through the invention and implementation of the electronic shelf label (ESL) technology in stationary retail. It creates new opportunities for the physical contribution channel. This potential is also the focus of this study by precisely dealing with the recognition and impact of DP with ESL technology on consumers’ purchasing decisions in stationary grocery stores. Our literature review includes current research on DP, ESL technology, price behavior, and price fairness. According to the first review, no single experiment on ESLs combined with DP in stationary grocery stores, and only a few general studies on ESLs exist. Thus, an experimental design is proposed to research customers’ post-purchase reaction/acceptance of ESLs in stationary grocery stores and customers’ recognition and perception (perceived price fairness) of DP adjustment strategies. Participants purchase twice an ethnically defined shopping cart in a supermarket by applying ESLs, whereby the second time, the prices of several products from the shopping list are slightly increased. The goal of the between-participants post-test-only control-group experiment design is to identify the technology's potential for stationary grocery stores. Equity theory deals with price fairness and is used as the primary consumer behavior model for price adjustments. The results depict a design for experimental research on DP with ESL technology. The system should function as a pre-study and discussion base for further research on this topic. A draft of the experimental setting (instruction sheets, evaluation plan, digitally designed survey) is already provided as a basis for further improvements. With the proposed execution plan, third parties can further test the experiment on feasibility and applicability in the described experimental setting by using technology (virtual reality, augmented reality) or on different industries or other groups.

Thanks to the prevalence of mobile applications (mobile apps), consumer behavior is shifting from conventional to online. Globally, mobile commerce has taken precedence over other forms of transaction due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic except for Generation X (Gen X) customers. They have restricted access to modern technologies and are critically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, this chapter applied the Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model (UTAUT), and Task-technology fit models (TTF) to determine how the pandemic and Gen X characteristics affect buying behaviors in the electronic marketplace. The primary research method was the quantitative approach, in which data was collected from 467 respondents through a structured questionnaire. The findings indicate that Gen X consumers’ mobile commerce buying intentions are influenced favorably by mobile shopping (m-shopping) efficiency, effort expectancy, and the perceived severity of COVID-19. Generation X’s shopping behavior in the e-marketplace through mobile apps was also affected by the usability of mobile applications and their desire to purchase online. Additionally, the Gen X consumers’ expectation of effort was negatively impacted by the usability of mobile apps.

Information Systems (IS) have been widely applied in Vietnam, and the IS advent has received much attention from Vietnamese practitioners and researchers. However, a shared account of IS knowledge in Vietnam is still lacking. Addressing this gap, we need a shared understanding of what we know and what we are doing, which can help coordinate our future actions. This introductory chapter sets a background for this shared understanding by reviewing the main themes of IS research in Vietnam. The chapter then updates the progress of the field by introducing nine current IS studies that are based in Vietnam. As a result, it contributes a contemporary reference and outlines future research directions for IS research in Vietnam.

This chapter analyzes the dematerialization of money in the age of COVID-19 pandemic. Although this process has become more visible following the pandemic, the dematerialization of money is not a new phenomenon. Over time, money was turned into fiat money, scriptural money, electronic money, and recently to digital money, namely in the context of cryptocurrency market. However, contrary to what would be expected, it was found that the growing trend toward the use of cryptocurrencies has been reversed with the emergence of the pandemic. The comparison between the pre-pandemic and the pandemic period shows the mean growth rates of daily trading volumes for six of the major cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, BitcoinCash, Ripple, and Litecoin) are considerably lower during the pandemic. This situation is particularly evident in the case of Ethereum, which from a mean growth rate of trading volumes of 0.54% in the pre-pandemic period, recorded during the pandemic a decrease of −0,575%. Significant drops were also observed in Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Litcoin. Even so, digital payments seem to be the future, namely through the launch of the so-called Central Bank Digital Currency. We can take the digital euro as a good example of this future reality.

In this chapter, we discuss the emergence of new business models based on the industrial internet as a potential game changer in manufacturing sectors and their effects on production processes and work. We observe an increased relevance of data for manufacturing and identify industrial internet platforms as an important infrastructure to analyze and make use of such data. We differentiate industrial internet platforms according to the question of whether their main function concerns the optimization of production processes (production-centered platforms) or a more effective distribution of products (distribution-centered platforms). The empirical analysis focuses on the often-overlooked distribution-centered platform type and Alibaba’s industrial internet platform Tao-factory, in particular. We find that Alibaba is restructuring the subcontracting arrangements in China’s domestic light industries, which has some positive effects on work in terms of defragmentation of the work process and higher wages for skilled garment workers. However, informal work arrangements continue to undermine decent work and the observed positive tendencies could be undercut by a race to the bottom in the long run.

In the era of the digital economy, three reconfiguration trends in global value chains (GVC) are emerging. (1) GVCs are becoming more regionalized; (2) complex value chains are shrinking; and (3) the driving forces of GVCs are changing with on-demand supply chains and digital platforms. The main findings of this chapter are: (1) Digital technology reduces the difference of global labor costs contributing to the division of several regional value chains from GVCs, with national institutions and regional FTAs accelerating this tendency; (2) “platform companies” became a new driving force of GVC governance; and (3) digital technologies such as intelligent logistics, telecommuting, and machine translation raise the possibility of reshoring through the reduction of trade costs. These changes present both challenges and opportunities for China’s future roles in GVCs. The chapter argues China should analyze the theoretical mechanism of the digital economy's impact on the reconstruction of GVCs from four dimensions: factor endowment, market size, geographical distance, and institutional quality. To leverage the competitive advantages of China as the center of regional value chains, the efficient countermeasures of China are to accelerate the combination of the digital technology and traditional industries, namely, accumulation of new comparative advantages of data as production factor, cultivation of general digital skills, provide comprehensive top-level design of digital platforms, construction of digital market supervision system, development of new business forms of digital economy, and building up of digital governance.

This chapter examines the role of financial technology (FinTech) in transforming the delivery of banking and financial services and its potential in promoting financial inclusion in Africa. The chapter discusses the main types of FinTech which include mobile money, mobile banking, crowdfunding, and blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies and their market developments in Africa. FinTech has introduced the use of new technologies that minimise the costs of providing banking and financial services, creating market access opportunities for new entrants, broadening access to new segments of the market and customers, and impacting on the competition structure of the existing financial service providers. The chapter then looks at the challenges facing FinTech in Africa as well as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Africa’s FinTech space. The chapter also highlights the importance of optimum regulation, which should be beneficial to innovations as well as participants—providers and users.

Regulatory evolution and technological developments following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis are changing the scope of financial markets, services and institutions. At the core of these adjustments are regulatory technology (RegTech) and supervisory technology (SupTech), which use information technology for regulatory monitoring, reporting, compliance, enforcement and supervision. This chapter assesses the effectiveness of SupTech and RegTech adopted by regulatory authorities including Central banks for supervisory administration and regulatory guidance to FinTech innovations in Africa. The chapter examines the use of SupTech and RegTech, elaborating in detail the importance of adopting these technologies in regulating FinTech in general and how the financial system stands to gain from their use. Regulatory mechanisms of FinTech and the adoption and implementation of RegTech and SupTech are discussed extensively. The challenges confronting their adoption in Africa, which relate to infrastructure, internet access, literacy, cybersecurity threats and capacity of users and regulators are also highlighted in the chapter. Ways of making SupTech and RegTech effective in Africa are analyzed in detail and policy recommendations are made. This is all part of the ways to make these technologies effective in Africa.

Banking regulation and supervision are critical for ensuring a stable and healthy banking system. Recent developments in Africa’s banking industry are influencing regulatory and supervisory changes aimed at enhancing the stability, health, and general performance of the sector in the region. This chapter examines current trends in banking regulation and supervision in Africa. The functions of central banks and regulatory policy are discussed in this chapter, as well as bank regulation and supervision in Africa. Regulations and supervision have had to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change. Central banks have had to change their legislation to include licensing and regulation measures for non-banking financial companies that did not previously come within traditional banking services. Central banks’ responsibilities have also been broadened to include regulation and supervision of technological companies that provide some financial services. Global banking rules, the Basel Principles, and Africa’s financial sector are also covered in this chapter. Following financial crises that often have global ramifications, international rules have been developed to oversee the banking sector. Africa’s financial regulators must embrace international methodologies and standards for governing banks in order to guarantee the stability of the continent’s banking institutions.

Kap. 11 ist das dritte Kapitel des Teils C. Es befasst sich mit dem Gebiet des Mobile Business. In Abb. 11.1 ist die Einordnung des Kap. 11 in den Teil C dargestellt.

Kap. 16 ist das erste Kapitel des Teils E. Es befasst sich mit dem Informationsmanagement. In Abb. 16.1 ist die Einordnung des Kap. 16 in den Teil E dargestellt.

Despite a global pandemic, it positively increases the intention to use contactless payments. MP usage still falls behind existing alternative payment methods like cash and card. Thus, this paper aims to explore the drivers and inhibitors of MP usage in relation to cash and card payment, which is still an underresearched area in MP. For this, we conducted an online survey (n = 227) in Germany and ran a partial least squares path modelling approach. The results reveal that relative advantage and compatibility drive the intention to use MP compared to cash and card payment. Especially, the result for relative advantage indicates that MP needs some “good” arguments to convince card-preferring users to switch to MP. Interestingly, users regard the disadvantages of MP differently. For instance, perceived switching costs are significantly stronger for MP compared to cash payment but data threat is significantly stronger for MP compared to card payment. The results of the disadvantages of MP confirm Germans’ strong “love” for cash payment and that German consumers regard MP as more similar to the card than to cash payment.

Martin Christopher, an international supply chain guru, asserted in 1992 that there are only supply chains in the marketplace, not enterprises. The real competition is no longer between individual enterprises, but between supply chains. In a sense, this is indisputable, as enterprises in the supply chain become increasingly an interconnected, unified and indivisible whole. As the value-creating entity evolves from an enterprise to a supply chain or even an industrial network, it is important to look at business from the perspective of the enterprise to the supply chain. In order to create value, capital is an indispensable element and resource, and the integration of industry and finance is also an inevitable path.

Looking back at history, technological changes have transformed the form of money from commodities, metals and paper to electronic forms. The connotations of money have extended from the theory that “although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver” to broader monetary dimensions to include credit money and highly liquid financial assets. With the rapid development of digital technologies such as blockchain, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, technology has had a greater effect on the evolution of money, giving birth to a new type of money—digital currency. In line with this trend, the digitalization of fiat currency has become the most important monetary and financial reform in the digital era, attracting broad attention from central banks, industries and academia around the world.

Internet technologies – like social media platforms and discussion forums – have transformed how people communicate with each other. In addition to improving access to information, news, and entertainment, they have impacted governance, politics, civil society movements, crisis response, marketplaces, and healthcare, among other parts of our lives. Although concerns regarding data misuse, privacy breaches, and overuse have grown recently, these technologies are continuing to soar, mostly among literate, urban, and connected communities, all across the world. However, despite their promises (and pitfalls), these technologies currently exclude billions of people worldwide who are too remote to access the Internet, too low-literate to navigate the mostly text-driven Internet, or too poor to afford Internet-enabled devices. This chapter presents the innovation, implementation, and adaptation of voice forums that have evolved over the last two decades, discusses challenges that plagued their growth, and highlights ingenious solutions that were used to address their pain points.

With the development of mobile computing technology and the popularization of smart mobile devices, computation-intensive applications have been widely-deployed and gained more and more attention. Although the development of mobile devices and mobile applications have brought great convenience to people’s production and life, it has also lead to some new issues. Due to the resource limitations of mobile devices, such as limited battery capacity and limited computing resources, mobile devices can offload some computing tasks to the cloud for processing. But cloud centers are generally far away from mobile devices. Therefore, offloading tasks from mobile devices to the cloud incurs a lot of power consumption and large latency. The emerging mobile edge computing (MEC) effectively solves this problem. This book focuses on the energy efficiency of computation offloading in mobile edge computing, and proposes the energy-efficient computation offloading solutions. Since the wireless channel state and task request arrival process are stochastic and dynamic, designing a dynamic and energy-efficient task offloading strategy faces severe challenges. This chapter introduces the background and challenges of mobile cloud computing, MEC, and computation offloading. The challenges of computation offloading are summarized. Our main contributions in this book are also illustrated.

This study aims to investigate patients’ behavioral intention toward the adoption of contactless healthcare applications in the post- COVID-19 pandemic era. Therefore, the study model extends the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) with the task technology fit (TTF) model, personal innovativeness, and avoidance of personal interaction to determine patients’ intention to adopt contactless healthcare applications for medical purposes. A research questionnaire was conducted on Jordanian citizens in a voluntary environment. In response, 383 valid questionnaires were retrieved. The study model is empirically analyzed with structural equation modeling (SEM). Findings of the structural model imply that was jointly predicted by UTAUT constructs, TTF, and API and explained substantial variance R2 78.4% in user behavior to adopt contactless healthcare applications. The current research contributes to theory by extending the UTAUT with the TTF model, API, and PI and enriching information systems literature in the context of users’ intention to adopt e-health technology. Practically, this research suggests that healthcare services providers should focus on IT fitness including internet-enabled devices and the number of facilities to operate the healthcare applications which in turn boost individual confidence towards the adoption of contactless healthcare technology. This research develops a unique model that examines user behavior towards the adoption of contactless healthcare technology to improve the healthcare industry. The findings of this research provide an answer on how to recover from COVID-19 repercussions on the healthcare sector while using such applications. Moreover, this study provides guidelines for clinical management through a virtual setting and guides health consultants, applications developers, and designers to design user-friendly applications for e-healthcare purposes.

Business intelligence encompasses all activities dealing with collecting, storing/managing, and analyzing business-relevant data with the objective of generating knowledge as input to decision support. Business intelligence is often used as an umbrella term for data warehousing, reporting and OLAP (online analytical processing), MIS/DSS, and data mining, respectively.If we count all topics listed above, it is obvious that business intelligence has quite a long history also in the tourism domain. As early examples in tourism, we can identify the DINAMO system introduced by American Airlines already in 1988 or TourMIS in 1998.The widespread use of ICT, especially the uptake of the Internet and social media, led to an increase of available data on customers, competitors, and the whole market in all major business domains, including tourism. More powerful hardware and sophisticated methods to store and analyze such data turned business intelligence into one of the fastest-growing technologies and most challenging areas in the last decade.This chapter gives an overview on the topic of business intelligence and all technical components of a BI architecture (i.e., information extraction and transformation, data warehousing, and different mechanisms and tools to access and analyze data, like reporting or OLAP tools, dashboards, or data mining toolsets). Moreover, the chapter looks at the history of BI in tourism and presents and discusses typical application scenarios in tourism. Finally, we look at current trends and latest developments in the area of business intelligence and their expected implications for the tourism domain.

The introduction of mobile information services to the tourism domain has represented a radical change in the way tourists plan, enjoy, and reflect on their travel experience. The Internet of Things promises to represent the next big advancement. This corresponds to the possibility of distributing small pieces of interconnected technology in the environment and within objects for a more pervasive monitoring and personalization of how the tourism experience is consumed and for the creation of an extended interaction interface that supports a more direct engagement with the destination and its facilities, products, and services. For the tourism sector, these advancements open up novel scenarios of ubiquitous computing, for example, smart shop windows, digitally augmented showcases for handicrafts display, augmented itineraries that engage visitors with other means than smartphones and tablets for a more immersive experience, personalized souvenirs and smart gadgets, stationary information kiosks that automatically identify their users, mobile applications that are aware of which products, and places the tourist has already been in contact with. This chapter provides an overview of the enlarged ubiquitous computing capabilities enabled by the IoT technologies and illustrates possible applications in the tourism domain.

Since its invention in 1989, the World Wide Web was extended with many advanced web technologies like XML, Web services, AJAX, JSON, HTML5, etc. They are enablers for innovations like mash-ups, responsive web design, web-enabled mobile apps, or augmented reality apps, which are building blocks for complex E-Tourism applications with many special use cases: Dynamic packaging engines are platforms for virtual/online tour operators. Content management systems evolved as core technology for travel communities, blogs, online advertising, and social media. Travel portals with Internet booking engines serve direct sales of travel suppliers and online travel agents. Online booking engines introduced self-service even for corporate/business travel management. Travel search engines offer direct price and product comparisons and search engine marketing. Destination management systems support service bundling, while mobile web apps innovated tourist guidance.

In diesem Kapitel wird ein Überblick über mobile Anwendungssysteme gegeben (Abb. 8.1). Programme, die auf mobilen Endgeräten ausgeführt werden, werden als App bezeichnet. Anfangs waren es vor allem Privatpersonen und Konsumenten, die sich Apps über die App-Stores der einzelnen Hardware- bzw. Betriebssystem-Anbieter heruntergeladen haben und lokal installierten. Unternehmen versuchen, mit Hilfe dieser Apps Marketing und Werbung zu betreiben sowie die eigenen Produkte und Dienstleistungen zu verkaufen. Die Anwendungen dieser Gruppe werden als Kunden-Apps bezeichnet. Für die Unternehmen und deren Mitarbeiter stehen darüber hinaus zahlreiche Business-Apps zur Verfügung, die in die vorhandene IT-Infrastruktur integriert werden müssen. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die Unterstützung von Geschäftsprozessen durch mobile Endgeräte. Generell sind alle webbasierten betrieblichen Applikationen, z. B. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)-Systeme oder Customer Relationship Management (CRM)-Systeme auch mobil nutzbar. Als dritte Kategorie werden Maschinen-Apps behandelt, die beispielsweise zur Fahrassistenz oder in medizinischen Geräten genutzt werden (Verclas und Linnhoff-Popien 2012, S. 12 f.).

NigeriaNigeria operates a constitutional democracy and a federal system of government. On account of its colonial heritage, the Nigerian legal system derives from English Law and customary lawCustomary law.

This chapter seeks to understand the behaviours of formal lenders in NigeriaNigeria as they respond to credit policyPolicy changes introduced by national regulators. NigeriaNigeria, like many developing countries, eagerly adopts international principles, codes, and guidelines for regulating financial markets sometimes on a voluntary or mandated basis.

The automotive industry is an extremely competitive market due to progressive technological advances and product development: all essential for long-term growth and brand recognition.

This study seeks to examine the determinants of user engagement in theme park apps from a uses and gratification perspective. Specifically, three different gratifications: utilitarian (i.e., utilitarian value, perceived ease of use, and convenience), hedonic (i.e., hedonic value and curiosity fulfillment), and social (i.e., social interaction and presence) gratifications are proposed to affect user engagement, which comprises three dimensions: cognitive, affective, and behavioral engagement. The research model was tested by collecting data via an online survey (N = 347). The results show that all utilitarian, hedonic, and social gratifications can facilitate users’ cognitive and affective engagement, while behavioral engagement is only affected by utilitarian and hedonic gratification. This study enriches the understanding of what motivates user engagement in theme park apps and offers practical implications for park managers.

Research on the current situation and Improvement Countermeasures of farmers' information security literacy under the background of new media information security has become the cornerstone of national overall security in the information age. Improving farmers' information security literacy is an inevitable requirement to protect farmers' personal privacy and property security. Using the questionnaire survey to analyze the four aspects of farmers’ information security awareness, information security knowledge, information security ability and information ethics in five provinces, it is found that farmers' information security literacy is not high as a whole, and put forward suggestions and paths to improve information security literacy.

Part of the success of the Chinese internet companies is due to the newness of the industry—they did not suffer strong disadvantages like companies in mature industries. Contrary to Huawei and Xiaomi, they do a large part of their business in China; they failed to internationalize their customers’ bases—except those pursuing a focalization strategy like Didi or TikTok. They are all private, and foreign shareholders played an important role in their equity. They gain access to technology through means comparable to any Western company: in-house R&D, hiring specialists, and acquisition of startups. Again, those companies benefited from a huge mass market, exhibiting impressive numbers of active users, and this came with high companies’ valuations. Again, they demonstrate how dependent they are on political bodies: alignment with authorities’ expectations is compelling.

Two different situations are examined. On one hand, there is the space industry where China has been involved for decades, with two big entities under state control, and which is still promising. On the other hand, there are emerging businesses which are new for China but also new for the world: the car of the future, the block-chain, the artificial intelligence, and the Fintech. They exhibit the traditional features of emerging high-tech businesses: academia is the source of knowledge, born global, plenty of startups are emerging, competition is fragmented, the ecosystem has to be put in place, and rules of the game need to be written. The Chinese authorities have a clear mindset about the future technological trajectory of those domains: they are the conductor; they show the way. But political leaders fully entrusted to the performers, that is, to the market, the upcoming of those industries.

The economy of the People’s Republic of China has gone through four stages since 1978. At that time, the challenge was to deal with outdated production tools and models. The upgrade took shape with the Sino-foreign joint-ventures; foreign partners were asked to bring new tech to access the Chinese market. The second stage was for Chinese partners to absorb and assimilate this new knowledge. The third stage was to reproduce this knowledge outside the joint-venture thanks to staff moves. In parallel, Chinese authorities started to build the basis of a truly national system of innovation capable of indigenous innovation. The chapter concludes with statistical evidence of progress made both at the inception of the innovation process with the production of scientific articles, and at the end with the number of patent applications.

Although the development of financial industry in China’s special economic zones in 2016 underwent a complex and severe test, it was still developing. The scale of assets was on the road of expansion, and there were positive changes in further upgrading regarding the concentration of the industry, continuous improvement of the status of pillar industries and in the initial effect of transformation. However, we should also note that the original problems such as poor operating conditions, unbalanced development, declining influence, continued accumulation of risks and the allocation of assets against the new normal have not changed substantially. In 2017, the development of the financial industry in the special economic zones is facing not only new challenges caused by the economic slowdown, a “spinoff from a virtual economy to a real economy”, financial disintermediation, write-off of non-performing assets, regulation and control of the real estate market and compliance supervision, but also new opportunities brought by the implementation of a number of reform measures such as “steady growth”, “industrial development”, “risk control”, “strong penetration”, “wealth management”, “deepening of reform” and “opening-up”. Based on the analysis of the new trends and problems of the development of the financial industry in 2016 and the new opportunities and challenges faced in 2017, it is advocated that the development of the financial industry in 2017 should firmly grasp the four main aspects of “return, consideration, allocation and innovation”.

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Blockchain, and Internet of Thing (IoT)-based applications require a massive resource, enormously high data rates, and increased throughput of 1 Tbps. To accomplish these requirements, existing 5G network may not be proficient. 5G will likely not have the ability to fully meet the needs of new applications based on self-driven vehicles, drone technologies, virtual reality (V.R.), augmented reality (A.R.), mixed reality (M.R.), and extended reality (E.R.). 6G networks will be the data superhighway and make the intelligent cyber-physical world fully connected. The 6G technologies are surprisingly helpful for integrating people, devices, vehicles, sensors, information, cloud resources, and robot specialists. 6G network enables great data rate, ultra-low latency, high bandwidth speeds, high quality of services, energy efficiency, and intelligent spectrum utilization. This chapter focuses on the evolution of 1G-6G and technological advancement that enabled a paradigm shift from 5G to 6G. Performance metrics of 6G is compared with 5G, and key features of 6G are also highlighted in the proposed chapter. Terahertz communication, MIMO, and fast full-inclusion access will bring about the densification of the 6G network. Further, the chapter also introduces 6G applications with emerging technologies.

In 2020, the sudden outbreak of COVID rapidly swept across the globe. As people of all countries are increasingly dependent on the Internet, and information and communication technologies such as 5G, AI and big data have ushered in a new round of development opportunities around the globe, new governance topics and demands have been emerging, creating conditions for international exchange and cooperation in cyberspace.

Chapter 6 provides an overview of the development of crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending in China including how the financing model works in China and how various factors have influenced their development.

In recent years, the world has experienced the transformation of the technology and the era of globalization or even brought about numerous tools that extremely important today. Through the incentive of RM30 that had been announced by the government spur towards awareness to use e-payment in daily transaction. This study aims to examine main aggravating factors towards digital wallet acceptance among online shoppers in Malaysia by consolidating the TAM model. The quantitative research was completed through questionnaires distributed to collect data. At random 270 respondents were selected. The data collected was analysed by using the Statistical Packages for Social Science Version 26 (SPSS Version 26) software based on the descriptive analysis, reliability analysis, and correlation analysis. The findings revealed that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and security have significant relationships towards the dependent variable (acceptance of digital wallet). This research offers significant insight for regulators to put much effort in introducing this new mechanism and promoting its benefit as well as enlarging the sustenance network.

This study is an attempt to measure the most important factors affecting the behavioral intention to use e-ticketing, considering the mediating effect of (Information Communication Tools (ICT) on the relationship between the following independent variables (perceived convenience, perceived ease of use, facilitating conditions, Perceived Usefulness, information quality, perceived security, perceived privacy, customer technical support, and infrastructure) and dependent variable (behavioral intention to use). The result revealed that the following independent variables (perceived convenience, information quality, perceived privacy) don’t have direct impact on the dependent variable (behavioral intention to use). While the following variables (perceived ease of use, facilitating condition, perceived usefulness, perceived security, and infrastructure) have direct positive impact on the dependent variable (behavioral intention to use). The analytic results showed that concerning the (ICT) tools, two categories of (ICT) were revealed, the (ICT) tools as a moderator for the first category (low skills) moderate the relationship between perceived convenience and behavioral intention to use, while for the second category (high skills) (ICT) tools moderate the relationship between (customer technical support, infrastructure) and behavioral intention to use. The study a survey scheme and data were collected using a structured questionnaire from a sample of (254) internet users. The analytical statistics were derived using AMOS® 20.0 software package.

The recent infusion of digital platforms into different aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship has supported digital entrepreneurship; however, the altered entrepreneurial processes are yet to be explored. This chapter aims to explore the role of digital platforms as external enablers in the entrepreneurial processes. It focuses on digital platform-based startups of Pakistan and draws on entrepreneurial bricolage theory to understand the enabling external resources. The authors followed multiple qualitative case study approach and collected data through semi-structured interviews from six startups operating solely on digital platforms, 1) XYLEXA, 2) Toycycle, 3) PaakHealth, 4) DadaJee.com, 5) Qurbani App and 6) PriceOye. The findings show that entrepreneurial process is a continuous process. Digital platforms have made entrepreneurial processes less bounded i.e., the products and services keep on evolving even after they have been endorsed to the end user. Moreover, platform-based startups having limited resources can pass through the entire entrepreneurial process by combining available resources efficiently and effectively. Entrepreneurial bricolage helps as a catalyst in successfully developing and exploiting the opportunity with existing resources.

Impacted by the tension in global trade and other factors, the world economy grew by 2.9% in 2019, reaching the lowest level in last decade. Since early 2020, the COVID-19 Pandemic spread globally and lashed global production, trade, cross-border investment and financial market, which intensified the risk of global economic downturn.

Although mobile payments have gained considerable attention in academic research, there still are major gaps in our more in-depth understanding of the antecedents of their acceptance and use. In this study, we aim to address these gaps by examining the potential gender and age differences in the use intention of mobile payments and its antecedents in terms of the effects of the antecedent factors on use intention as well as the antecedent factors and use intention themselves while also considering the critical prerequisite of measurement invariance. Moreover, through a careful selection of the compared age groups, we extend the examination to cover also the potential generational differences between digital natives and digital immigrants. As the data for the study, we use the responses to an online survey that were collected from Finnish consumers in May 2020 and are analysed by using structural equation modelling (SEM). In terms of gender, we find no differences in the effects of the antecedent factors on use intention but find women to perceive the use of mobile payments as both less easy and less secure than men. In turn, in terms of age and generation, we find the effect of social influence on use intention to be stronger for younger users representing digital natives, whereas older users representing digital immigrants were found to perceive the use of mobile payments as less easy. Finally, we discuss these findings in more detail from both theoretical and practical perspectives.

In this chapter, we will first give a brief overview of the mobile instant messaging landscape. Subsequently, we focus on the instant messaging application “WhatsApp” and describe its current features and which kinds of data can be extracted from it. Based on the existing literature, we provide practical advice for researchers seeking to work with WhatsApp data with respect to data collection, participant incentivization, data processing, informed consent, anonymization, and reproducibility of research. These insights might also prove useful to researchers seeking to work with other kinds of chat log data. We conclude that WhatsApp is an intriguing data source for social science research questions but that the data have to be treated with great caution to ensure ethical conduct. To facilitate this, we present several issues to contemplate for designing studies and briefly introduce the “WhatsR” package for R - our own package for parsing and visualizing data from exported WhatsApp chat logs with convenience features for tailoring, anonymizing, and extracting metadata from them.

How to identify the enemy’s hidden military power based on limited information is a great challenge in a military confrontation. A military confrontation environment can be naturally modeled as a complex system. Fuzzy cognitive map inherits the main characteristics of fuzzy logic and neural network. Thus, it is widely used to model complex systems and get a weighted directed network from existing data. In terms of great succuss of fuzzy cognitive map for modeling and analyzing complex systems, a hidden node localization strategy is proposed. This algorithm can measure the anomalies between fuzzy cognitive maps obtained from different data segments. The experimental results showed the our approach could effectively identify the enemy’s hidden military power from the observed data. In several case studies, the influence of various parameters on the accuracy of positioning is analyzed through experiments. The framework for detecting hidden nodes is expected to be successfully applied in many fields.

Since the 2008 global crisis, the focus of industrial policy has shifted to manufacturing strategy in the main economies in the world. In this paper, we examine the national manufacturing strategies of the US, Germany, Japan and China from the analytical perspective of varieties of capitalism and the developmental state in order to have a better understanding of the strategy plans and implementation as a mode of regulation and their impacts on each country’s mode of production and accumulation.We find that the manufacturing strategies of the four countries overlap considerably in terms of industry targeting and that China’s Made in China 2025 master plan is the most comprehensive strategy for developing the entire advanced sectors. While the US and Germany have primarily put in place a bottom-up process of strategy implementation led by enterprises, China has adopted a top-down approach, similar to its earlier national policy initiatives in high-technology industries. Compared to other nations, Japan is weak in implementation for domestic macroeconomic and structural reasons. For all four countries, while there is a superficial convergence in terms of the structure of their manufacturing strategy plans, the mechanisms for monitoring implementation still differ because each national manufacturing strategy is deeply embedded in the existing institutions and economic structures.Apparently, through the implementation of national manufacturing strategies, the world of capitalism is increasingly dominated by two extreme varieties: a revised model of the liberal market economy, represented by the US, and a reinforced of developmental state model, exemplified by China. This bipolarization of varieties of capitalism suggests there will be a new round of competition between manufacturing powers.

This research investigates the factors that influence the Investor switching intention from deposits or investing their funds in traditional financial services, namely banks, to invest in the Financial Technology Peer-to-Peer Lending. We build the research model adapting the Push–Pull Mooring (PPM) Framework to describe the migration theory of customers switching behavior. The Push factors include customer’s Satisfaction on Bank and perceived Service Quality on Bank. While the Pull Factors is Individual’s Knowledge toward Peer-to-Peer Lending and Personal Reward Sensitivity. Multiple Regression Analysis is used to analyze the model and relationship between variables. We collected data from 170 respondents who are investing part of their portfolio in a bank deposit. We find that Pushing factors of customer satisfaction and perceived Service Quality on banks has a negative effect on investor switching intention. The Pull factor of an Individual’s Knowledge toward Peer-to-Peer Lending and personal Reward Sensitivity positively affects investor switching intention.

The growing speed of technology has profoundly transformed tourism industry and challenged the value proposition of many tourism businesses. Tourism, as a service industry, has been particularly impacted by technological disruptions that have entirely changed how people travel. The development in technology is aimed to benefit the tourism industry, and mobile technologies have tremendously changed tourists’ experiences as well as the distribution channel of tourism products. Mobile applications exist for tourists to access information virtually at any time and from any place where they can make travelling plans and arrangement including accommodation reservation, flight trackers, food ordering, destination guides, online travel agencies, attraction guides, and payment. Comparing several studies on various mobile technology applications, this chapter provides insight on the adoption of these applications from tourists’ perspective. It explores the different types of mobile applications available and how tourists use them.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have had a significant impact on the hospitality and tourism industry over the last decade, and they continue to be the main drivers of tourism. Tourism businesses make significant use of information technology for marketing purposes. This is true in the area of assisting in marketing decisions as well as in the area of communication and sales. Technology has helped to reduce costs, increase operational efficiency, and improve services and customer experience. Thanks to the availability of information technologies enabled by the Internet, such as websites and social networks in the tourism industry, it has become easier to implement marketing strategies for tourism products in a way that improves the quality of online service to effectively meet the needs of customers. Every aspect of tourism product features and tourism marketing features are significantly influenced by ICT. With the use of robots, artificial intelligence, and other automation systems being used in the manufacturing industry as well as in the tourism and hospitality industry, the use of these new technologies as both a product and a marketing tool has become prevalent in the marketing applications of tourism businesses. ICT, digitalization, and smart technologies seem to offer four important new opportunities to firms in today’s business world. These include developing new business, developing new methods to facilitate management, improving productivity, and gaining a competitive advantage. The study aims to highlight the benefits, contribution, and application areas of technology in the tourism, travel, and hospitality industry.

Becoming one of the notable and major recklessly rising economic sectors in Asia is tourism, which has grown incessantly over many decades as of now. The countries in this region have continuously been building on infrastructure which is ICT-ready, attracting tourists by harmonizing bargains and prospecting through tourist funds. Growth of tourism is always driven by improved communication, transportation, and innovated upgradation of travel products. Mobile Internet technologies have impacted the travel agencies, hotels, and airlines to provide a wider range of new experience with the customers. Mobile applications and cashless mobile payment have created data-driven services which are driving and changing the processes in hotels, restaurants, retailers, money exchangers, and banks. The expansion of tourism business has wide prospects that will endure a generation of incredible business opportunities for various destinations and its stakeholders. Social media is rapidly impacting the hospitality industry, through wide reach and peer reviews of the tourist operators, hotels, and transporters via online technologies, messaging systems with voice commands, and AI-machine learning to ensure authentic and unlimited traveler satisfaction. Winning destinations are those who connect the power of tourism and backup with creative upgraded amenities which contribute to their evolutions by low carbon emission, climate sustainable actions, and environment friendly and socially respectful sustainable development. Well-planned and effectively managed tourism can generate prospective outcome through people preparation, which is the key for the future. Widespread approach toward capacity-building programs targeting all tourist personnel and length and breadth of the spectrum should be involved to become more effective in the use of tourism-driven technology products. The study covers Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines.

In order to meet the needs of group enterprises for data privacy protection processing in the internal private network environment, this paper proposes an optimization design method of Privacy Protection System (PPS) based on cloud native. The main goal of this method is to transform structured data using data anonymization techniques to mitigate attacks that could lead to privacy breaches. From the perspective of logical architecture, this method supports the anonymization of data using the privacy protection model and related parameters selected by the user. First, the identifiers are removed from the dataset to be processed, and constraints are imposed on the quasi-identifiers. Further, the algorithms for protecting sensitive properties that require certain assumptions about the attacker’s goals and background knowledge are also supported. In particular, in the process of anonymization, the scheme introduces the methods of utility analysis and risk analysis, so that the anonymization results can be accurately evaluated. Finally, the proposed method allows users to iteratively update the privacy-preserving model and related parameters according to the results of the anonymization evaluation. From the perspective of technical architecture, the proposed method uses Spring Boot as the back-end framework and MyBatis as the persistence layer framework. At the same time, in order to ensure system security requirements, Json Web Token is also used for user authentication. Finally, when designing the system deployment scheme, cloud native technology is introduced to encapsulate system functions into microservice containers, and cluster management tools are used to dynamically manage microservice containers to ensure high availability of the system.

This paper investigates the factors influencing mobile payment adoption and its contribution to financial inclusion, which seems sparse and lacking in the literature. Over 75% of Palestinian adults are excluded from financial services by banks and other non-bank financial institutions, so mobile payment is expected to bridge this gap. A quantitative approach was employed using 307 questionnaires designed based on the theory of planned behaviour and reflective model for measuring financial inclusion. In data analysis, a structural equation modelling in AMOS was applied to data elicited. It was found that all direct paths within the model were supported, except for the paths between subjective norm and mobile payment intention. The proposed model supports the mediation role of attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioural control between beliefs and mobile payment intention. Additionally, with successive increases in mobile payment usage, financial inclusion moved further to increase. Precisely, the growth of mobile payment usage by 1% can improve financial inclusion by 0.60%. Taken together, the structural model can explain 36% of covariance in financial inclusion for mobile payment. The originality of this research lies in empirically investigating the potential role of mobile payment in fostering financial inclusion in Palestine, which would contribute to the efforts that intended to overcome the financial exclusion faced by the majority of Palestinian, which benefits the researchers, public, business community, and policymakers.

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is a digital form of central bank money, and is different from traditional reserves or settlement accounts balances. In line with the digital technology era, CBDC has gained interest among the majority of the countries. Central banks in a number of countries have started experimenting, piloting, launching, and have laid their direction on CBDC. However, the development of CBDC in Malaysia is still behind compared to many other countries in the world. This paper aims to present the current status of CBDC in Malaysia. To achieve the goal, this paper explores literature reviews on CBDC, countries’ milestones on CBDC and Malaysia’s Central Bank stand on CBDC. This review found that Malaysia’s Central Bank has no intention for the immediate plan for CBDC in Malaysia. However, Malaysia’s Central Bank continues assessing the CBDC potential, especially in the digital assets and payments space. This study also found that Malaysia’s Central Bank participated in a cross-border payments trial under Project Dunbar.

Nachdem in einem ersten Schritt dargestellt worden ist, dass Digital Leadership zunächst gewollt werden muss, so stehen nun im zweiten Schritt die Digital Skills und damit das „Können“ im Mittelpunkt.

This chapter traces the many logistical matters that will have to be dealt-with in transitioning from present-day franchise finance to the new system of digital Citizen Ledger Finance. These include the movement of assets and liabilities from contemporary bank and other financial institution balance sheets to the consolidated Citizens’ Ledger; the reorganization of public finance ministries and central banks in manners consonant with the new system; associated regulatory changes; and like matters. The chapter shows that these matters, though many and complex, are readily managed by thinking and planning systematically in a manner analogous to the tracing of assets and liabilities on digital balance sheets themselves, as done in Chapter 6.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of perceived firm transparency and privacy risks on initial trust of smart services. Furthermore, this study attempts to explain the variance of perceived usefulness by initial trust. The framework and hypotheses as well as the development of instruments based on a review of previous literature. Using a questionnaire survey, data relating to the constructs are collected from 1004 respondents. The research used structural equation modelling (SEM) to identify important factors influencing the initial trust and perceived usefulness of smart services.

Die fortschreitende Verbreitung intelligenter Produkt-Dienstleistungs-Bündel, die als „smart product-service systems (PSSs)“ bezeichnet werden, ermöglicht neue Geschäftsmodelle, die eine Verlagerung von produkt- zu dienstleistungsorientierten Zahlungsmodalitäten erfordern. Mit Hilfe einer experimentellen Studie beleuchten wir den Zusammenhang zwischen verschiedenen Zahlungsmodalitäten und dem Widerstand der Konsumenten gegenüber smart PSSs, untersuchen relevante Adoptionsbarrieren als Mediatoren und prüfen, ob die Zahlungsmodalität die Wahrnehmung der Konsumenten mit Blick auf den wahrgenommen Dienstleistungsanteil des smart PSS beeinflusst.

Green and eco-innovation are becoming more important to organisations that need to implement sustainable change. As a result, organisations are emphasising the way innovation can incorporate environmental goals at the same time achieve financial objectives. This chapter will discuss the role green and eco-innovation play in an organisation’s overall strategy.

Money laundering involves placement, layering, and integration to transfer and convert illicit fiat currency into legitimate assets. The process often relies on multiple local and remote participants that use numerous financial institutions and complex instruments to obfuscate the trail and origin of illicit funds. The use of the Internet, combined with cryptocurrency and blockchain development, has enabled money launderers to expand their activities into cyberspace. Cyber laundering provides quick, easy, low-cost, anonymous transactions and circumvents traditional detection techniques used by the authorities. In contrast to traditional money laundering, cyber money laundering is relatively new, and cryptocurrency and the blockchain make it technically complex. The inherent complexity and reach of the technology have contributed to in-cohesive and fragmented regulatory and enforcement structures across jurisdictions. This chapter presents an overview and comparison of traditional and cyber money laundering methods and operationally compares traditional and cyber money laundering. The work also covers existing legal and regulatory frameworks, identifies areas of necessary improvement, and proposes potential technical and nontechnical anti-cyber laundering remedies.

The investment required to achieve the commitments of the 2015 Paris Agreement and the available finance leaves a huge gap that needs to be filled. Notably, the COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated this finance gap. The cost of financing green projects is another very important factor. To deal with these problems, green digital financing offers a cost-effective and transparent option. Technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain, Internet of things, and big data can help boost green financing. This chapter highlights the investment requirement in India to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and also outlines the steps taken by India toward green digital financing. This chapter also underlines the challenges faced by India in the field of green digital financing and draws some initial recommendations for policymakers in harnessing green digital financing to achieve the SDGs.

This chapter provides a critical discussion of the factors influencing the digitization of green finance in Bangladesh, a country located in the north-eastern part of South Asia. Although Bangladesh has several green funds for financing renewable and other climate-related projects to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs), the proportion is significantly low. Apart from the other identified barriers, the absence of a solid policy framework is a significant loophole hindering the digitization of green finance in Bangladesh. Therefore, the chapter argues that the primary objective for the government of Bangladesh is to focus on preparing a policy framework for digitization side by side with establishing strong regulatory authority for market regulation and stability. The chapter also highlights the importance of interdisciplinary research and development programs for acquiring new FinTech ideas for facilitating green digital financing in Bangladesh for green transition and meeting the SDGs.

Tackling climate change is one of the most significant challenges facing the world. Financing sustainable development has been at the forefront of discussion. The financing gap to achieve the sustainable development goals in developing countries was estimated at several trillions of dollars annually before the pandemic. The need for sustainable rebuilding intensified in the light of the COVID-19 effect. The world’s financial system needs to respond to the short-term collapse in resources of developing countries and provide long-term strategies to build back better following the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the nascent nature of green business models, a lack of data, and other related barriers, green finance is considered too risky and costly by financial service providers. Digitalization has the potential to reduce the cost, and by leveraging the data, streamline the risk assessment of green lending. This chapter explores the current state of green digital financing. We assess the persisting barriers and provide policy recommendations to expand the transformative impact of digitalization in financing the green development agendas of countries.

The recent improvements in digital finance seem impressive in many respects. However, emerging sustainable finance literature reveals that improvements in digital finance have limited positive impacts on the green finance agenda. This disconnection raises concerns about its benefits from a sustainability perspective and brings into consideration the role of policymaking to improve the green digital finance framework. This chapter investigates the role of government policies to develop a more effective green digital finance framework based on the Paris Climate Agreement goals and the sustainable development goals. Utilizing a literature review and selected case studies, we suggest that government policy actions are critical for successful implementation at national and global levels. We argue that digital finance initiatives can be channeled into green digital finance in a well-designed ecosystem. Specifically, governments can support green digital finance by implementing sound regulatory policies as well as establishing incentives through green data initiatives, lower taxes, and technological infrastructure investments.

The patterns in international economic relations have changed in the last decades as the relevance of intangibles rises. There is a growing concern on developing digital trade which may help to diversify and add value to exports. The use of digital platforms may directly connect SMEs with consumers, expanding their market access or allowing traditional services such as education, medicine, among others, to be traded across borders. This has become particularly relevant for China and Latin America, which trade relations have been characterized by the exchange of raw materials (export of commodities from Latin America to China) and final consumption goods (imported from China to the region). A problem toward the development of digital economy is the fragmentation of normative frameworks that will promote cross-border exchanges. In this context, the objective of this chapter is to analyze the digital trade dimension of Sino-Latin American relations, with special emphasis on the inclusion of e-commerce-related provisions in their international agreements. It is concluded that the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement can be used as a benchmark to guide the current and future negotiations between China and Latin American economies.

Der Digital Shop steht allgemein als Begriff für den digitalen Verkauf von Produkten bzw. Dienstleistungen durch ein Unternehmen über digitale Netzwerke. Damit erfolgt eine Integration innovativer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien zur Unterstützung bzw. Abwicklung von operativen, taktischen und strategischen Aufgaben im Absatzbereich. Die zunehmende Akzeptanz digitaler Medien bei den Nachfragern geht mit einemwachsenden Angebot an Produkten und Dienstleistungen einher, die entweder teilweise oder sogar ausschließlich über das Internet durch diese „virtuellen Läden“ vertrieben werden. Ein Digital Shop ist somit ein „eigenständiges System aus Hard- und Software, das einem Händler erlaubt, seine Wirtschaftsgüter über Rechnernetze anzubieten, zu verkaufen und gegebenenfalls zu vertreiben“ (Zwißler 2002, S. 32). Man kann also vereinfacht sagen,dass ein Digital Shop ein virtueller Verkaufsraum eines Unternehmens ist. Die Grundidee des digitalen Verkaufs ist also darin zu sehen, dass die Beziehung und die verkaufsrelevanten Abläufe zwischen einem Unternehmen (Anbieter) und einem Kunden (Nachfrager) über die mit Hilfe des Internets vernetzten Computer (s. Kapitel 1.1.2) und den damit einhergehenden Rahmenbedingungen des digitalen Informationsaustausches (s. Kapitel1.1.4) abgewickelt werden (s. Abb. 28; Kollmann 2022a, S. 259).

The present study investigates the factors affecting the intention to adopt and recommend technology to others: based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology. This applied research is descriptive-analytical in terms of data collection. According to the analytical model presented in this research, the environmental characteristics of websites are more important in the early stages of the online shopping process. The information on a website is critical to examine a product with customers’ criteria or needs. An attractive website creates a more positive feeling in the audience, keeps users on the website for a more extended period, and attracts new customers. Also, as part of both the emotional and logical aspects of using technology, individual factors influence the intention to adopt and recommend Internet banking by customers. In the realm of e-commerce, how environmental and individual characteristics affect user intent is still challenging. After data collecting and hypotheses tested, it was concluded that also in this research, these factors affect the acceptance and recommendation of internet banking to others.

After obtaining the data, establishing the end to end connections, and the interface layer design, the task of equipment management concerns understanding the operating status through real-time monitoring, whose related information is mainly used as the foundation for decisions on management maintenance. However, after the acquisition of data and understanding the operating status of the equipment, from which aspect can we obtain a solution to reduce warranty and maintenance costs?

In this chapter, it is aimed to rank the dealers of a company operating in the automotive sector according to their environmental sustainability performances. In this context, Evaluation Based on Distance from Average Solution (EDAS) method, which is one of the Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods, was used in combination with fuzzy logic to determine the rankings of dealers. The EDAS method considers the average solution for the selection of the best alternative. The EDAS method, which evaluates the negative and positive distances of the alternatives from the average solution, is an effective method because it can rank the alternatives according to two different reference points. The reason for considering EDAS together with fuzzy logic is modeling uncertainties in the measurement values of different criteria that affect the environmental sustainability performance levels of dealers and to reflect this uncertainty to the dealers’ priorities. In the application process of the fuzzy EDAS (F-EDAS) method, seven environmental sustainability performance criteria were considered to evaluate nine predetermined dealers. Thus, the dealers with the highest and lowest environmental sustainability performance were determined. Additionally, aspects of dealers that need improvement to advance their environmental sustainability performance were also evaluated.

One of the most important components of a long-term business relationship in supply chain management is to evaluate and choose an appropriate supplier. In this chapter, we introduce a new extension of Complex Proportional Assessment (COPRAS) method based on q-Rung Orthopair Fuzzy Sets which successfully deal with the uncertainty of real-life subjective decisions. COPRAS method especially takes into consideration the effect of maximizing criteria and the sum of the weighted normalized values of minimizing criteria, basically, cost and benefit type criteria. When COPRAS is used alone, criteria weights cannot be calculated and other Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods should be used. The proposed method overcomes this drawback of COPRAS by determining not only the criteria weights but decision makers’ importance weights as well. An illustrative example is given to solve the supplier evaluation problem that consists of 6 criteria and 5 alternatives. Finally, to show the validity of the method, a comparison is made with a similar method, and at the end of the comparison, it was seen that stable and efficient results can be produced by the proposed approach.

Der Digital Shop steht allgemein als Begriff für den digitalen Verkauf von Produkten bzw. Dienstleistungen durch ein Unternehmen über digitale Netzwerke. Damit erfolgt eine Integration innovativer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien zur Unterstützung bzw. Abwicklung von operativen, taktischen und strategischen Aufgaben im Absatzbereich. Die zunehmende Akzeptanz digitaler Medien bei den Nachfragern geht mit einem wachsenden Angebot an Produkten und Dienstleistungen einher, die entweder teilweise oder sogar ausschließlich über das Internet durch diese „virtuellen Läden“ vertrieben werden. Ein Digital Shop ist somit ein „eigenständiges System aus Hard- und Software, das einem Händler erlaubt, seine Wirtschaftsgüter über Rechnernetze anzubieten, zu verkaufen und gegebenenfalls zu vertreiben“ (Zwißler 2002, S. 32). Man kann also vereinfacht sagen, dass ein Digital Shop ein virtueller Verkaufsraum eines Unternehmens ist (s. Kapitel 1.3.1). Die Grundidee des digitalen Verkaufs ist also darin zu sehen, dass die Beziehung und die verkaufsrelevanten Abläufe zwischen einem Unternehmen (Anbieter) und einem Kunden (Nachfrager) über die mit Hilfe des Internets vernetzten Computer (s. Kapitel 1.2) und den damit einhergehenden Rahmenbedingungen des digitalen Informationsaustausches (s. Kapitel 1.3) abgewickelt werden (s. Abb. 97)

Das Digital Procurement steht allgemein als Begriff für den digitalen Einkauf von Produkten bzw. Dienstleistungen durch ein Unternehmen über digitale Netzwerke. Damit erfolgt eine Integration innovativer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien zur Unterstützung bzw. Abwicklung von operativen, taktischen und strategischen Aufgaben im Beschaffungsbereich. Das „Digital Procurement“ stellt dabei im Prinzip einen Sammelbegriff für die digital unterstützte Beschaffung dar, ohne dass jedoch eindeutig definiert werden kann, was alles darunter zu verstehen ist. Einigkeit herrscht in der Literatur allerdings darin, dass der Einsatz von Internettechnologien ein Kernelement von digitalen Procurement-Konzepten darstellt (Nekolar 2013; Bogaschewsky 1999). Die Grundidee des digitalen Einkaufs ist also darin zu sehen, dass die Beziehung und die einkaufsrelevanten Abläufe zwischen einem Unternehmen (Einkäufer) und einem Lieferanten (Verkäufer) über die mit Hilfe des Internets vernetzten Computer (s. Kapitel 1.2.1) mit dem zugehörigen digitalen Informationsaustausch (s. Kapitel 1.3) abgewickelt werden (s. Abb. 48).

Die innovative Informationstechnik induziert spätestens seit Beginn der 1990er Jahre einen Strukturwandel im gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Bereich (Tapscott 1996, S. 17 ff.). Waren noch vor einigen Jahren Computer und Netzwerke nur wenigen Spezialisten vorbehalten, sind sie heute bereits Bestandteil des täglichen Lebens. Die digitale Technik und ihre Auswirkung auf die Informationsübertragung sind allgegenwärtig. Der stetige Fortschritt und die wachsende Bedeutung der Informationstechnik sowie der Ausbau und die Vernetzung von digitalen Datenwegen sind notwendige Voraussetzungen für eine neue Dimension des wirtschaftlichen Miteinanders: dem digitalen Handel auf digitalen Datenwegen (Weiber/Kollmann 1997a, S. 513 ff.; Kollmann/Krell 2011a, 2011b). Welche Entwicklungen bei den technischen Rahmenbedingungen spielen demnach für das Digital Business eine besondere Rolle?

The restaurant industry has long been comparatively reluctant to invest in technologies for digital customer integration. This phenomenon especially applies to full-service restaurants. The latter range from casual to fine dining and accounted for 59 percent of the global consumer spending on eating out in 2016. At the same time, all other outlet categories in the food and beverage (F&B) market show stronger actual and expected growth rates. In this highly contested market setting, technology can contribute to building a sustainable competitive advantage for restaurants.

In this paper, we propose an educational game framework allowing instructors to customise the game’s learning content in the context of cyber-security, with the aim of ensuring learners are engaged with educational games. This can further support them continuing to acquire useful cyber-security knowledge, while playing with their peers. Based on this framework, a prototype digital game called “Cyberpoly” was implemented and evaluated. This game allows unfamiliar or potentially unappealing, ‘dry’ learning contents (on cyber-attacks and incidents) to be placed in a context similar to a “monopoly” game board, encouraging multiple players to take an active role when landing on various cyber-attack or incident squares. The learner can not only answer the questions generated by the game, but also actively send cyber-attacks to other players, when landing on another’s land. Learner data was collected from 30 undergraduate participants, with results suggesting that most found it engaging and felt motivated to learn. Further to this, we also obtained feedback from two academic professors, to discuss not only game-play but also game element management.

The transfer of the “world factory” title to China is regarded as one of the signs of change in the world’s economic development. The term “world factory” is based on the concept of “factory” to discuss the world economic structure, i.e., treating a single factory as the most basic subject to look at the global production capacity distribution.

A period of “profound changes” is the authoritative strategic judgment on global development by the Chinese officials, which has attracted great attention both domestically and internationally.

Venezuelan entrepreneur’s face an enormous challenge in surviving both an economy that has collapsed (with an estimated cumulative GDP decline of 75% between 2014 and 2020), and a notorious absence of public policies aimed at promoting and consolidating a healthy entrepreneurship ecosystem. In spite of this, several remarkable dynamic initiatives prove that opportunities may arise for those with the motivations, right skills, and capabilities. The reconstruction of the Venezuelan business sector and its economy necessarily requires supporting and nurturing these types of individual initiatives. This effort requires that all actors of the ecosystem create opportunities for collaboration, as well as increasing the participation of new actors, such as the large and increasing Venezuelan diaspora.

The digital transformation of the economy and society is also changing agriculture at an above-average rate and intensity. It is true that agriculture has already been able to achieve considerable increases in yields in recent decades, also thanks to high levels of mechanisation, and thus guarantee food security. The high productivity is reflected in the fact that one farmer fed around 4 people in 1900, around 10 in 1949 and around 155 today (with less land)—with an increasing population. The digitisation of agriculture continues this growing productivity process on an expanded, innovative technological basis and at the same time is profoundly reshaping the agricultural and food sector compared to the past. More differentiated, effective and targeted agricultural production, increased quality and higher yields of food products in the animal and plant sector, reduced environmental impact and more economical use of resources in the sense of sustainable development, increased operational efficiency in the areas of time, costs and management, economic and social security for farmers, as well as improved transparency for trade and consumers are goals that are advanced in a differentiated manner through digitisation. The saturation of third-order information and communication technologies in the agricultural sector is successively leading to a new kind of combination of farming experience, agricultural entrepreneurship and digital technological competence in the comprehensive ‘infosphere’ as an advanced agricultural ‘onlife’—the offline and online worlds that have grown together indistinguishably (see Floridi 2015, p. 67). Farming rules and algorithms, human intelligence and artificial intelligence, the eye of the knowledgeable farmer and the outsourced ‘eye’ via GPS, science-based and practical experience—all this will form a new synthesis, so to speak, in a future integrated digital food economy—encompassing the agricultural and food sectors. Agriculture is already one of the most comprehensively digitised sectors, although smart digital farming is still dominated by applications in specific areas and individual cases. The entire range of different digital technologies is used in the agricultural sector, which are in constant development (becaming, permanent updates). These include, above all, computing/PC, online technologies/Internet, satellite technology/GPS, data mining and Big Data, cloud technology, artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, robotics, sensor technologies, drones (unmanned aerial vehicles), augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), blockchain, mobile payment, mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets, but also apps, tracking systems, scoring, chatbots and social web connections. These digital technologies of various orientations, characteristics and degrees of maturity are used in different agricultural production segments, are being tested or are available as prototypes. The most important ones are currently:

Um zu erkennen, in welcher vernetzten und kulturellen Verfassung sich Ihre Organisation befindet, ist eine Status-quo-Bewertung ratsam. In den letzten Jahren hat sich deutlich gezeigt, dass eine Spreizung stattfand: Unternehmen, die sich organisational deutlich weiterentwickelten und Banken oder auch Finanzdienstleister, die an alten Strukturen festhielten und Veränderungen zu langsam oder gar nicht umsetzten.In dem Spannungsfeld von Pandemie und Rezession, neuer Regulierungsvorschriften, erodierender Profitabilität und zunehmendem Kostendruck müssen sich Banken und Sparkassen neu orientieren. Dabei stellt sich die Frage, wie sich in Zeiten von verändertem Kundenverhalten und neuen Technologien die Wertschöpfung 4.0 realisieren lässt. Neben strategischen Aspekten sind die kulturellen Rahmenbedingungen einer Organisation entscheidend: Profitiert das Kreditinstitut von vernetzten Strukturen, um den Wandel aktiv und dynamisch voranzutreiben und um zukunftsorientierte Wertschöpfungsstrategien umzusetzen?In diesem Kontext hat der Leser die Chance, anhand einer detaillierten Silo-Analyse den bankindividuellen Status zu bewerten. Anschließend folgen konkrete Handlungsvorschläge, die sich sowohl auf Organisations- als auch auf Führungs- und Teamebene erstrecken.

Peru is currently considered one of South America's key emerging markets, with a significant recent history of economic stability. Nevertheless, the same country is also known for having one of the lowest financial inclusion rates in the region. To fight this latter aspect, the Peruvian government developed an interoperable mobile money platform, based on a digital electronic wallet for the unbanked, called the Billetera Móvil (BIM). Based on this mobile wallet, the purpose of this study aims to debate how financial inclusion may be facilitated by the banking sector’s digital revolution. It discusses the fundamentals of FinTech, with a particular emphasis on financial inclusion and associated concerns. Moreover, current research aims to contribute to the understanding of how the recent digital transition can benefit disadvantaged target groups. Field observation and a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach allowed collecting empirical data to support the research findings and discussions. It was found out that, even though there is an effective potential for the digital transition to be impactful in the financial inclusion of the unbanked, a long path has yet to be crossed to achieve a successful result with this inclusive e-wallet.

Norway is generally characterized by a pervasive presence of digital services. It is currently undergoing a digital transformation across different domains, from daily life to public and private enterprises. In this introductory chapter, we first unpack the main drivers of digital transformation in Norway so far and its enabling conditions based on three illustrative examples: the development of Altinn, a digital platform supporting digital communication between citizens and public and private organizations; the evolution of BankID, Norway’s electronic identification system; and the current push for open data sharing leveraging experiences in the energy industry. We identify key common enabling conditions: a trust-based cooperation across social partners and across public and private sectors, the public sector’s driving role, cross-organization consolidations and consortia, and application-oriented initiatives. In the second part of the chapter, we summarize the content of the subsequent chapters in this book shedding light on different facets of digital transformation in Norway.

Mobile payment has become increasingly popular worldwide, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, older adults have more difficulties in adapting to mobile payments than others. To understand the reasons behind this phenomenon, we explore cognitive lock-in and its antecedents in adopting WeChat Pay based on the status quo bias theory. We use the PLS-SEM technique with survey data from Chinese older adults over the age of 50. The results show that the cognitive lock-in of older adults is significantly affected by technology anxiety, habit, regret avoidance, and uncertainty costs. Moreover, older adults’ intention to adopt WeChat Pay is positively associated with social influence and self-actualization, while cognitive lock-in is a significant negative determinant. This study can help us better understand the underlying mechanism behind older adults’ adoption of mobile payment from a cognitive lock-in perspective. Furthermore, this study steers the discussion about improving older adults’ digital literacy and optimizing age-appropriate services for mobile payments.

This chapter moves on from the national context to the specific and changing production circumstances and convergence strategies underpinning Chinese television production across broadcast institutions and digital streaming services. For Jenkins (Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press, 2006, p. 2), media convergence constitutes a structured interactivity in ways that new technologies have been designed to be more responsive to consumer feedback. It denotes a scenario ‘in which multiple media systems coexist and where media content flows fluidly across them’, an ongoing process of intersections between different media systems, not a fixed relationship, whether it be developments in technological, industrial, cultural or social changes (Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press, 2006, p. 282). Following the macro-level investigation on the periodisation of Chinese television and the complex production ecology among broadcast and digital players in Chap. 2 , I move on to examine how the different origins and histories of Chinese media institutions have affected their convergence production strategies and explore the institutional relationships between broadcast and digital sectors in this chapter. In doing so, I will show how media convergence, as a strategy, plays out differently at CCTV and HBS, and how they respond to innovation in the post-TVIII era differently according to their origins.

Although wearable devices have high potential in the emerging scenarios, these scenarios face many security and privacy challenges. It is because of the inherent openness of wearable devices limitation of the network, terminal resource and the technology. This brings a lot of obstacles to design of security and privacy protection solutions in wearable device and network. However traditional security and privacy protection method do not fit in these emerging scenarios. Security and privacy issues have gradually become a huge challenge for emerging wearable device applications. Therefore, the design of application security and privacy protection scheme of wearable devices has been widely concerned and focused by academia and industry.