In this paper, we have adapted the components and factors of an existing financial resilience measurement framework, and leveraged a survey that reflects the decision-making of Irish social housing residents in money management and their capacity to cope with unexpected financial shocks. Extending existing financial literacy definitions, this paper shifts the perspective from measuring financial resilience components to exploring the drivers that could impact that resilience at an individual level. This bridging of the objective and subjective domains contributes to the common good by exploring how citizens deal with daily decision-making in a financialised world.

This paper draws on qualitative and quantitative data from social housing tenants in Ireland, exploring how the subjective experience of financial well-being can be understood, and correlating this experience to behavioural and contextual factors. The findings suggest that despite working within tight budgeting constraints, residents are self-disciplined in living within their means, put aside money for unplanned expenditure, and "do without" when money runs out. Residents are using mobile phones predominantly to shop and check bank balances, with online banking used to access traditional payment instruments (e.g. Direct Debits) for fixed outgoings, to receive incoming revenue and to save. There is little evidence that residents get value from personal finance management tools. Instead, we conclude that financial well-being is a set of behaviours, necessitating self-discipline and control to avoid unsustainable indebtedness. The design of financial services should take the lived experience of citizens into account, in particular promoting resilience through savings instead of credit.

This paper draws on quantitative and qualitative research from social housing tenants in Ireland, exploring the relationship between digital access to financial resources and financial well-being. We find that using the mobile phone to check a bank balance is associated with decisions around financial commitments (not running out) and resilience (having savings, being able to withstand a shock). Using the internet to check a bank balance is correlated with not having financial difficulties. However, paying bills via mobile phone is correlated with not having money left over at the end of the month and not saving, suggesting an increasing impulsiveness in decision making. IT-enabled banking and commerce have positive and negative implications for day-to-day money management and expenditure decisions. We therefore suggest further multi-disciplinary research on the opportunities for information technology to inform policy and practice around prudent money management decision making for consumers.

Within a retail environment the scheduling of staff to accommodate the dynamic nature of customer throughput is of utmost importance. However, in outlets that face unpredictable patterns of customer activity, suboptimal staff schedules are a common occurrence. This event adversely affects the staffing rota, service time, and queue length thereby affecting the level of customer satisfaction. At present the vast majority of retail environments make use of a number of estimation techniques based on past experiences and historical data, sometimes supported by the ad-hoc observation of customer throughput. However, the lack of pervasive monitoring technologies may hide weaknesses within current staffing rotas and standard service times. A Decision Support System (DSS) with a real-time data logging architecture, referred to as the Staff Utilisation-Resource Simulation Model (SU-RSM) is the subject of this paper. The SU-RSM is designed to assist retail managers in assessing the efficiency of their staffing rotas to a high degree of granularity. In this paper, design, implementation and evaluation of SU-RSM in a single retail bank is presented. This research offers the opportunity to perform a back-to-back comparison between the existing paper-based estimation models used in the bank and the SURSM. Findings provided in this paper reveal a lack of awareness on the actual customer flow by managers and staff, and as a result a suboptimal allocation of resources within the branch. This knowledge gap provides a strong justification for the use of real-time data logging technologies combined with a simulation model (i.e. DSS). Such an approach will assist retail mangers in achieving near optimal staff resource allocation.

PurposeE‐Government programs often address problems such as institutional ineffectiveness, lack of transparency, or social exclusion. Financial exclusion and people's reliance on ineffective payment methods appear to be a well‐known problem world‐wide. Yet, despite the large number of related case studies and academic reports on the topic, little is understood about the impact governmental payment practices have on the financial behaviour of citizens. Few investigations address how governmental use of payment methods and related policies may impact citizen/consumer behaviour. Through investigating the move to E‐Payment based methods to replace the dominant use of cash and cheques in social welfare in Ireland, the purpose of this paper is to explore the recipient's view of this government project.Design/methodology/approachThe research is organized as an intrinsic case study where the unit of analysis is one large project. It aims at a rich description of one particular case by analysing data collected from two main sources of evidence: preliminary investigation is done by reviewing relevant documents, while primary data collection involved face‐to‐face surveys of social welfare recipients (using a short, structured questionnaire augmented with a few open‐ended questions).FindingsThe planning and execution of E‐Government programs often face barriers of mostly social and historical nature. As the results of this research indicate, these barriers might be hard to overcome as they are the result of certain behaviours and attitudes rooted in people's daily experience, such as their daily financial reality. Results also imply that the choice of an adequate E‐Payment method and migration scenario by governmental agencies will be crucial to the outcome. Implementation and education will also be critical.Originality/valueThis study reports on the influence governmental decisions related to social welfare payment methods may have on recipients' financial habits regarding the choice of payment options. It also shows how recipients' everyday experience and financial reality determine the way they relate to payment options.

We have built particle accelerators to understand the forces that make up our physical world. Yet, we do not understand the principles underlying our strongly connected, techno-socio-economic systems. We have enabled ubiquitous Internet connectivity and instant, global information access. Yet we do not understand how it impacts our behavior and the evolution of society.To fill the knowledge gaps and keep up with the fast pace at which our world is changing, a Knowledge Accelerator must urgently be created. The financial crisis, international wars, global terror, the spreading of diseases and cyber-crime as well as demographic, technological and environmental change demonstrate that humanity is facing serious challenges. These problems cannot be solved within the traditional paradigms.Moving our attention from a component-oriented view of the world to an interaction-oriented view will allow us to understand the complex systems we have created and the emergent collective phenomena characterising them. This paradigm shift will enable new solutions to long-standing problems, very much as the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric worldview has facilitated modern physics and the ability to launch satellites.The FuturICT flagship project will develop new science and technology to manage our future in a complex, strongly connected world. For this, it will combine the power of information and communication technology (ICT) with knowledge from the social and complexity sciences.ICT will provide the data to boost the social sciences into a new era. Complexity science will shed new light on the emergent phenomena in socially interactive systems, and the social sciences will provide a better understanding of the opportunities and risks of strongly networked systems, in particular future ICT systems. Hence, the envisaged FuturICT flagship will create new methods and instruments to tackle the challenges of the 21st century.FuturICT could indeed become one of the most important scientific endeavours ever, by revealing the principles that make socially interactive systems work well, by inspiring the creation of new platforms to explore our possible futures, and by initiating an era of social and socio-inspired innovations.

This paper derives a theoretical framework for consideration of both the technologically driven dimensions of mobile payment solutions, and the associated value proposition for customers. Banks promote traditional payment instruments whose value proposition is the management of risk for both consumers and merchants. These instruments are centralised, costly and lack decision support functionality. The ubiquity of the mobile phone has provided a decentralised platform for managing payment processes in a new way, but the value proposition for customers has yet to be elaborated clearly. This inertia has stalled the design of sustainable revenue models for a mobile payments ecosystem. Merchants and consumers in the meantime are being seduced by the convenience of on-line and mobile payment solutions. Adopting the purchase and payment process as the unit of analysis, the current mobile payment landscape is reviewed with respect to the creation and consumption of customer value. From this analysis, a framework is derived juxtaposing customer value, related to what is being paid for, with payment integration, related to how payments are being made. The framework provides a theoretical and practical basis for considering the contribution of mobile technologies to the payment industry. The framework is then used to describe the components of a mobile payments pilot project being run on a trial population of 250 students on a campus in Ireland. In this manner, weaknesses in the value proposition for consumers and merchants were highlighted. Limitations of the framework as a research tool are also discussed.

This study finds that company size is a major determinant of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation in Ireland. There is little evidence of a relation between CEO remuneration and company performance. However, several corporate governance variables are related to remuneration in a manner that suggests that good governance reduces executive pay. There is also some evidence of a distinctive ‘US effect’, in that companies that are more exposed to business practices in the United States (US) have higher remuneration, particularly in the form of executive stock options.

This paper derives a theoretical framework for consideration of both the technologically driven dimensions of mobile payment solutions, and the associated value proposition for customers. Banks promote traditional payment instruments whose value proposition is the management of risk for both consumers and merchants. These instruments are centralised, costly and lack decision support functionality. The ubiquity of the mobile phone has provided a decentralised platform for managing payment processes in a new way, but the value proposition for customers has yet to be elaborated clearly. This inertia has stalled the design of sustainable revenue models for a mobile payments ecosystem. Merchants and consumers in the meantime are being seduced by the convenience of on‑line and mobile payment solutions. Adopting the purchase and payment process as the unit of analysis, the current mobile payment landscape is reviewed with respect to the creation and consumption of customer value. From this analysis, a framework is derived juxtaposing customer value, related to what is being paid for, with payment integration, related to how payments are being made. The framework provides a theoretical and practical basis for considering the contribution of mobile technologies to the payment industry. The framework is then used to describe the components of a mobile payments pilot project being run on a trial population of 250 students on a campus in Ireland. In this manner, weaknesses in the value proposition for consumers and merchants were highlighted. Limitations of the framework as a research tool are also discussed.

This paper considers the issues around managing large scientific projects, and draws conclusions for the governance and management of FuturICT, based on previous experience of Big Science projects, such as CERN and ATLAS. We also consider the legal and ethical issues of the FuturICT project as the funding instrument moves from the Seventh Framework Programme to Horizon 2020.

This paper derives a theoretical framework for consideration of both the technologically driven dimensions of mobile payment solutions, and the associated value proposition for customers. Banks promote traditional payment instruments whose value proposition is the management of risk for both consumers and merchants. These instruments are centralised, costly and lack decision support functionality. The ubiquity of the mobile phone has provided a decentralised platform for managing payment processes in a new way, but the value proposition for customers has yet to be elaborated clearly. This inertia has stalled the design of sustainable revenue models for a mobile payments ecosystem. Merchants and consumers in the meantime are being seduced by the convenience of on-line and mobile payment solutions. Adopting the purchase and payment process as the unit of analysis, the current mobile payment landscape is reviewed with respect to the creation and consumption of customer value. From this analysis, a framework is derived juxtaposing customer value, related to what is being paid for, with payment integration, related to how payments are being made. The framework provides a theoretical and practical basis for considering the contribution of mobile technologies to the payments industry.

Enterprise Ireland and Briconi Holdings Ltd (Innovation Partnership Research Grant IP/2009/0038)

The recent financial crisis motivates our re-thinking of the engineering principles for and infrastructures intended to create business value in vital sectors. Existing monolithic, inwarddirected, cost insensitive and highly regulated technical and organizational infrastructures for financial services make it difficult for the domain to benefit from opportunities offered by new computing models such as cloud computing, as a service, hardware as a service, and utility computing. The scale and global impact of the recent financial and economic crisis justify our domain focus to explore, from a engineering perspective, potential for increased uptake of software as a service in financial services as well as extrapolating our results to services in other vital domains. We describe in this paper an on going research agenda to develop engineering (SSE) for Innovative Global Infrastructure for Financial Services. We propose novel engineering involving a coherent blend of domain knowledge, policy modelling, social, cultural, and global factors with converged IT, telecom and media. Parts of this paper are based on an European Union Framework Program FP7 ICT call 5 proposal addressing challenge 1- Objective 1.2 - Service/Software Engineering methods and tools.

Augmented Reality 206 representations of the real world.In that respect Virtual and Augmented reality can potentially serve two objectives (Maad et al, 2001): (a) reflecting realism through a closer correspondence with real experience, and (b) extending the power of computer-based technology to better reflect "abstract" experience (interactions concerned with interpretation and manipulation of symbols that have no obvious embodiment e.g.share prices, as contrasted to interaction with physical objects).The main motivation for using VR / AR to achieve objective (a) is cost reduction (e.g. it is cheaper to navigate a virtual environment depicting a physical location such as a theatre, a road, or a market, than to be in the physical location itself), and more scope for flexible interaction (e.g.interacting with a virtual object depicting a car allows more scope for viewing it from different locations and angles).Objective (b) can be better targeted because the available metaphors embrace representations in 3D-space (c.f.visualization of the genome).VR and AR technologies are currently widely used in the exploration of real physical objects (e.g.car, cube, molecule, etc.) or a physical location (e.g.shop, theatre, house, forest, etc..).In the course of exploration the user is immersed in the virtual scene, and can walkthrough or fly through the scene.The user's body and mind integrate with this scene.This frees the intuition, curiosity and intelligence of the user in exploring the state of the scene.In a real context, agents intervene to change the state of current objects/situations (e.g.heat acts as an agent in expanding metallic objects, a dealer acts as an agent in changing bid/ask quotes and so affects the flow of buyers and sellers).Introducing agency into a VR or an AR scene demands abstractions to distinguish user and non-user actions especially when these go beyond simple manipulation of objects by the user hand, or walking through and flying physical locations (Maad et al, 2001).

Within retail banking making decisions related to staff allocation to deliver services is complex in nature. It is often the case that certain services are either over or under staffed. Over staffing incurs a cost to the bank while under staffing impedes existing services and typically offers a poor consumer experience. Thus, making these sizing decisions is important in terms of both short and long term impact. In this paper, traditional approaches to measuring branch performance are compared with a new approach leveraging leading edge technologies. While current performance measurement protocols are based on an audit scenario, with a group of experts travelling from branch to branch to perform scheduled monitoring of key processes. This paper intends to demonstrate that such evaluation and auditing activities can be performed in near real-time using for example live customer location tracking feeds at the branch level. When implemented correctly the integration of such a technology should ensure service based activities can be executed in a far more efficient manner. The effectiveness of this approach from a performance measurement perspective is assessed well beyond simple cost factors in order to deliver a higher level of service quality and improve overall efficiency levels e.g. average customer waiting times and staff utilisation at various points throughout the day. This paper presents its findings from two perspectives: 1) Existing Data Gathering Approach (comprehensive analysis): To help evaluate the existing data gathering approach, a queue and staffing resource simulation model has been developed. 2) Automated Data Gathering Approach (initial and projected impact): Further use of leading edge technologies for data representation, in the shape of dashboards of management information, lead to a complete decision support solution. The granular level of detail attainable from such location tracking devices is immense, providing the dual function of both enhancing staff allocation solutions which can provide near real-time data, as well as new analytical capabilities to branch managers and regional managers alike. Branch metrics have been extensively evaluated in the past from a variety of viewpoints through the application of different business processes and technology integration. In this paper the Predictive Customer Queue-Resource Simulation Model (PCQ-RSM) architecture is proposed. Using simulation tools, an extensive evaluation of an existing manual data collection approach is contrasted with the application of a location tracking technology. It is evident from initial experiments that new dynamic staffing approaches can help improve the overall performance of service based businesses.