Electronic Wealth Transfer

The virtual world that we have created affects not just our ability to share photos and gossip, news and information, goods and services, but also wealth and stock! Whether it be through electronic banking or the virtual arm of the global stock marketplace, the ‘World Wide Web’ allows for vast sums of money and stock (which hold a monetary value) to be exchanged. Now although these two transactions in themselves are very different they both, in their most primitive form facilitate the transfer/exchange of wealth. Although they do both have the more traditional physical presence as well, eg. High street bank, their usefulness and popularity are ever growing.

NASDAQ (the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is the largest electronic based stock exchange service available in the United States and processes more trading volume per hour than any other stock exchange in the world. This example helps to illustrate just how large a place this electronic market has taken within the world market of stock and trading. This can ad no doubt will only get bigger as technology advances and the market for such a service become greater and greater. It allows for the marketplace to be taken out from the physical restraints of the traditional method, which placed all of the buyers and sellers in one geographical location. This allows for remote trading from anywhere in the US or the world, depending upon which market you are trading within. NASDAQ has four different internal markets:

- NASDAQ Capital Market

- NASDAQ Global Market

- NASDAQ Global Select Market

- NASDAQ PORTAL Market

Internet banking has grown largely over the last few years and has played a large place in how at least the British banking system operates and how banks want to develop in the future. Modern commercial banks are all trying to make the move into the virtual world so to cut down on the number of customers attending their high street banks for reasons that can be sorted out automatically on the internet. This save them money through having less staff in the bank and can give better customer accessibility to their own account information and money transfer options. This point of accessibility is a main contributing factor to the term mobility (as discussed in Floraine’s previous blog entry) and so where a customer can have ease of accessibility to there own financial information and service then there is a definite increase in mobility.

The general point that I am wishing to make here is that the virtual world of the ‘World Wide Web’ has made these two forms of money transfer possible and thus has created a ‘virtual mobility of wealth’.