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Social exclusion, data exploitation, surveillance, and economic inequality on the web are mainly technological problems. The current web of centralized social media clouds delivers by design a winner-takes-all digital economy that stifles innovation and exacerbates power asymmetries between citizens, governments, and technology oligopolies. To fix the digital economy, we need a new, decentralized web where citizens are empowered to own their data, participate in disintermediated peer-to-peer marketplaces, and influence policy-making decisions by means of innovative applications of participatory and deliberative democracy. By reimagining “web 3.0” as a cloud commonwealth of networked virtual machines leveraging blockchains and sharing code, it is possible to design new digital business models where all stakeholders and participants, including users, can share the bounty of the Fourth Industrial Revolution fairly.

The covid-19 pandemic has posed massive challenges to every actor of our social system. In Southeast Asia, businesses are no exception; well-established corporations moved toward digital transformation faster than others. With a prescriptive objective in mind, this study explores the acceleration of the digital transformation in the retail industry in Sri Lanka upon the Covid-19 pandemic. Taking a qualitative research approach, the paper describes different approaches for DT. Business leaders from banking, telecommunication, and fast moving consumer goods were interviewed. Some business leaders had a strategic vision towards digitalization, not because they anticipated the pandemic coming, but rather because of its advantages. Managers saw that digital transformation would bring two main advantages. One is through disintermediation, by reaching out to clients directly, and that customers can reach out to businesses anytime anywhere. Second, in terms of the cost factor, digital implementations were conceived comparatively cheaper in the long run. The ‘new normal’ of businesses keep changing its ways every day as the virus variants evolve, warning us, this could be a situation that we have to deal with for longer than anticipated. This makes investing in digitalization and further keep the impetus of agile implementation worth the effort.

The response in Asia to the emergence of crypto-assets has varied enormously intra-regionally. Developments in the larger capital markets have ranged from actively permissive industry-regulator partnering that has led to more granular regulation (Japan), to cautious approaches openly permitting industry development while applying existing laws where possible (Hong Kong), to banning specific activities while also promoting blockchain technology (Mainland China). After a review of the Asian narrative in section 1, the current status of regulation in Asia is summarized in section 2. Sections 3 and 4 address the hurdles to ecosystem development and question whether regulatory incrementalism is sustainable. The final section 5 reviews suggestions for policy development.

In recent years, new service providers appeared in many segments of the economy. Financial intermediation is also affected by this new trend. In general, conventional-type banks play the intermediary role of connecting lenders and debtors. Aside from this, banks also own competitive advantages in financial services, such as performing asset transformation, processing information, and monitoring debtors. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, commercial banks became stricter with respect to their lending activities, providing the space for other, non-traditional forms of financing. The increasingly important role played by alternative financing is also supported by a technological development in finance called FinTech. The largest share of alternative finance is possessed by peer-to-peer lending (P2P), a type of disintermediation that facilitates funding and investment between private individuals through an online platform. P2P platforms contribute to social welfare by extending the advantages of direct finance to smaller-scale lending. Clients, however, should also consider the associated risks. This chapter offers an overview of P2P lending’s characteristics. It identifies the main differences and competitive advantages of these platforms, compared to traditional banks. Although the chapter offers some rational and irrational explanations for the relevance of platform lending, it also highlights the fact that the future of P2P platforms is far from obvious.

The effect of the fourth industrial revolution, coupled with three core technological drivers, namely, automation, disintermediation and decentralization, has bought about an unprecedented change in the global financial industry. The global Fintech investment has reached $57.9 billion in the first half of 2018 (Islamic Fintech report-2018). Top-ranked financial institutions have accepted the need for change and they are now investing in data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and Big Data. Moreover, 77% of them have targeted to introduce blockchain in the system by 2020.

The chapter presents an overview of the European Commission’s flagship legislative proposals for a new regulatory framework for crypto-activities in the European Union (EU) and a pilot regime to facilitate DLT experimentation by market infrastructures. To provide some context for the proposals, the chapter reflects on some of the issues industry, regulators and supervisors have encountered in seeking to reconcile innovative DLT applications with EU and national financial services law. The chapter goes on to outline the key elements of the legislative proposals, which are intended to mitigate risks effectively and facilitate the scaling-up of DLT and crypto-asset applications in the EU.

In the early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama published a book with the provocative title “The End of History and the Last Man”. The book was based on an article published a few years earlier and the main argument was that the battle of political ideas ended with the victory of Liberal Democracy as the sole version of social arrangement after the collapse of Socialisms around the world.

This chapter empirically explores UKIP’s and the EFF’s performances as they orient themselves to the media ecology. It relies on a grounded theory analysis of the parties’ performances and their media coverage and a mapping of these to public engagement on Twitter. The parties’ performances of mediation are ambiguous. On the one hand, they signal directness by employing social media affordances for primarily symbolic purposes. This they combine with anti-media populism. On the other hand, these mediated performances of disintermediation also target gatekeepers. The claim to disintermediation demonstrates populists’ representativeness so as to justify further media coverage. Both parties then meet the demands of the media ecology—visibility, authenticity and efficacy—by addressing a variety of media types through assemblages of hybrid mediated performances.

This chapter covers the potential uses of blockchain from accounting, legal, and financial perspectives, provides a brief review of smart contracts and includes a high-level summary of classifiers and risk scoring methodologies. We have used the example of disintermediation in peer-to-peer (P2P) online lending as a case study. We identify three main areas in which blockchain as a service can provide advantages: blockchain-based creditworthiness assessments, blockchain and real-time accounting, and historical data-keeping. Finally, we estimate that the funding of P2P platforms will increase from a recent USD 100 billion to USD 150 billion by 2025 (of which we forecast a 10% market share of P2P blockchain-based platforms or USD 15 billion in absolute terms).

Crowdfunding has been an alternative source of financing for both businesses and individuals in recent years. It is an alternative source of financing, since it discards the traditional financing intermediaries, such as credit institutions, in order to apply for a financing through the crowd. However, disintermediation is—in many countries—only a transitional stage in the development of a sui generis legal regime adopted in several legal orders. In these States, a new status—with its correlative obligations—is created. Other states (the majority of the 19 national reports on this subject) have merely adapted existing regimes to include these new “actors”, namely companies operating platforms for linking financiers and funders.

The current efforts to provide institutional and legal certainty around blockchain-based innovative solutions reflect the status of the technology as it appears in the market today, which emphasizes more the “disintermediation” properties of the DLTs and less the “decentralization” properties. With the improvement of the design architectures, the algorithmic efficiency of the smart contracts and the blending of DLTs with machine learning we expect “decentralized autonomous organizations” to become more efficient over time and reach more strategic industries. This will transform market structures, business and operational models and it is expected to have strong macroeconomic effects. This will pose significant challenges to the regulator. A principles-based approach is sine qua non for creating a sustainable competitive advantage in order for an economy to leverage the benefits of blockchain. European Union is a pioneer regulator in the space of distributed ledgers. It adopts a technologically neutral approach. We believe that this is an appropriate approach however technological neutrality should be coupled with business model neutrality. This is a requirement for making sure that the regulator will not be directed by short-term considerations and constraints. The European Parliament’s Blockchain Resolution is a text that reflected the views of how to approach, from a regulatory point of view, a technology which is still evolving. This text is the basis for the regulatory initiatives of the EU in blockchain-related topics and became a reference point for many other jurisdictions around the world. This chapter presents the views of the Rapporteur of the Blockchain Resolution and indicates the significance of creating demand for a new technology from a Political Economy point of view.

With the development of digital sales tools, for example robo-advisors, and its adoption by consumers, sales management is changing rapidly. This development may lead into disintermediation of salespeople as technologies emancipate consumers to inform themselves about offerings. Consequently, consumers may not view the buying process necessarily driven by humans. Whereas research has already surveyed the perspective of salesperson technology adoption, little is known about the consumer perspective when it comes to customer–salesperson interaction technologies. Thus, our main contribution is to compare different levels of customer–salesperson interaction technologies and its impact on behavioral constructs. Using experiments, we contribute to the literature by investigating how different forms of customer–salesperson interaction technologies impact customer perception.

Crowdfunding has been an alternative source of financing for both businesses and individuals in recent years. It is an alternative source of financing, since it discards the traditional financing intermediaries, such as credit institutions, in order to apply for a financing through the crowd. However, disintermediation is – in many countries – only a transitional stage in the development of a sui generis legal regime adopted in several legal orders. In these States, a new status – with its correlative obligations – is created. Other states (the majority of the 19 national reports on this subject) have merely adapted existing regimes to include these new "actors", namely companies operating platforms for linking financiers and funders.

This paper aims to examine the impact of financial technology (Fintech) on Islamic banks’ income from perspective of the theory of financial intermediation. This study argues that the existence of banks as intermediaries due to transaction cost and asymmetrical information. In Islamic banking operation, fee-based income is a significant component of income derivation of providing services. The study postulates that Fintech has made access to financial services at a lower cost; hence reduce potential fee-based income for Islamic banks. This study applied panel data models from 2009 to 2016 on the dataset for Malaysia. The results provide empirical evidences on the impact of financial technology revolution on the banks’ income in Malaysia. The findings also indicated that different evidences on impact of financial technology revolution on the Islamic banks’ income and conventional banks for dual banking system. Islamic banks appear to significantly affect by the Fintech revolution due low penetration of online banking and larger banks are relatively invest more on the technology which result in cost saving and increase efficiency. However, Islamic banks should embrace with the paradigm shift and emergence of financial technology revolution promptly to prevent financial disintermediation and create value to their stakeholders. This study provides empirical evidences on the impact of financial technology and Islamic banks in a dual banking system. The study will extend the current body of knowledge in the field of financial technology and Islamic banking by providing insights into regulators and operators of the Islamic banking sector.

Blockchains are distributed ledgers that enable the disintermediation of collaborative processes and, at the same time, foster trust among partners. Modern blockchains support smart contracts, i.e., software deployed on the blockchain, and guarantee their repeatable, deterministic execution. Alas, blockchains and smart contracts lack standardization. Therefore, smart contracts come with heterogeneous properties, APIs and data formats. This hinders the integration of smart contracts running in different blockchains, e.g., into enterprise business processes. This paper introduces the Smart Contract Invocation Protocol (SCIP), which unifies interacting with smart contracts of different blockchains. The protocol supports invoking smart contract functions, monitoring function executions, emitted events, and transaction finality, as well as querying a blockchain. The protocol is accompanied by a prototypical implementation of a SCIP endpoint in the form of a gateway.

Digital technology has paved the way to a progressive disintermediation in many industries including the arts and cultural sector. This chapter examines the role of digital technology as a means to reclaim the heritage that is being lost or destroyed, by illustrating the entrepreneurial case of Rekrei. Building on the disintermediation and value cocreation literatures, this chapter highlights how digital technology can change the way heritage is funded, produced and consumed, by enhancing customer participation and value co-creation. Managerial and policy implications emerged from this research.

As the underlying technology behind Bitcoins, blockchains have attracted the attention of entrepreneurs, policymakers, and academics alike. Its potential to facilitate transactions, coordination without a central authority, and its capacity to support smart contracts are likely to open the door for its application to numerous settings. One of the more prominent applications is the clean energy sector. This chapter provides insights on how this novel technology that offers disintermediation, transparency, and flexibility is providing new ways of interaction to tackle challenges of communication, coordination, and efficiency in the clean energy sector. Along with providing a brief overview of the blockchain technology, we discuss some of the prominent clean energy applications of the technology, such as micro energy exchange grids, cap and trade, and electrical vehicle charging networks. Furthermore, the chapter includes empirical evidence on initial coin offerings (ICOs) launched by projects focusing on various aspects of development of renewable energy sector. We identify six prominent themes of services, namely, clean cryptocurrency mining, energy exchange, project financing, investment intermediation, network building, and hosting incentive programs. Furthermore, we find that clean energy ICOs tend to be more successful than other similar ICO projects.

The blockchain technology has already started to dramatically disrupt the tourism industry. It has the potential to create a new landscape in the tourism industry generated by increased disintermediation, to generate new markets from several cross-industry applications, to modify the systems of rating, booking, supply chain, transportation, contracts, and payments as we know them. This paper aims to identify the effects that blockchain technology will have on marketing in the tourism industry. Based on the literature review, on the analysis of the success stories and cases, on the observations on the functional models of the actors that already use the blockchain in the tourism industry, the paper highlights the development prospects in the field and builds the basis for shaping the concept of the future marketing in tourism industry.

Over the last couple of decades in the lending industry, financial disintermediation has occurred on a global scale. Traditionally, even for small supply of funds, banks would act as the conduit between the funds and the borrowers. It has now been possible to overcome some of the obstacles associated with such supply of funds with the advent of online platforms like Kiva, Prosper, LendingClub. Kiva, in particular, allows lenders to fund projects in different sectors through group or individual funding. Traditional research studies have investigated various factors behind lender preferences purely from the perspective of loan attributes and only until recently have some cross-country cultural preferences been investigated. In this paper, we investigate lender perceptions of economic factors of the borrower countries in relation to their preferences towards loans associated with different sectors. We find that the influence from economic factors and loan attributes can have substantially different roles to play for different sectors in achieving faster funding. We formally investigate and quantify the hidden biases prevalent in different loan sectors using recent tools from causal inference and regression models that rely on Bayesian variable selection methods. We then extend these models to incorporate fairness constraints based on our empirical analysis.

To analyse the disintermediation of agents, this chapter explores the case of the political party Podemos defined as the connective party, i.e. a new type of party that has adjusted its structure and functioning to a communicative context proper to the disintermediated society. The authors note some unfulfilled or problematic aspects of this restructuring of traditional organizations such as the administration or the parties. In fact, they argue that, far from signifying real change, the disintermediation of agents is nothing more than a readjustment to maintain traditional power relations.

The collection of advanced manufacturing technologies known as ‘3D Printing’ (3DP) or ‘Additive Manufacturing’ (AM) are increasingly gaining commercial acceptance through their ability to radically change the way products are made. Extensive research in the engineering domain has already detailed the technical challenges surrounding the adoption of these emergent technologies, highlighting their ability to readily produce complex geometries in a range of materials. By comparison, the implications of 3DP for business are far less clearly explored, with a general dearth of empirical research that exploits real-world data. Nevertheless, there is a general consensus in the business literature that 3DP can theoretically improve supplier responsiveness whilst simultaneously increasing product customization. Additionally, disintermediation of the supply chain and a localization of production may strengthen the relationship between the manufacturer and its customer, reducing the need for the transportation and warehousing. This vision for 3DP emphasises the role of manufacturers in value creation, and assumes that service companies will relinquish their roles within the supply chain. Given the top 50 Logistics Service Providers (LSPs) alone have revenues of over 250Bn USD it is unlikely they would retreat voluntarily. Instead several LSPs have started to explore other ways of maintaining their presence within the 3DP industry, and in this chapter, we explore the potential implications of 3DP on both production and supply chain service firms. We consider 3DP from both the traditional manufacturing-engineering domain (product orientated), and the supply chain domain (service orientated), and extend the existing concept of Product Service Systems (PSS) within the 3DP context. We develop a conceptual framework to encompass the unique opportunities that 3DP can bring to PSS, and through a detailed case study explore the implications that have arisen for a Global LSP that provides 3DP services. We provide a first insight into the barriers and opportunities for supply chain service firms to add 3DP capabilities to their service offering to create PSS business models, and highlight pertinent directions for further exploration.