Fundamental changes in the global economy are changing the basis of organisational competitive advantage. The challenge in attaining a competitive advantage is characterised by factors such as increased competition, market volatility, geographically dispersed operations, customer awareness, raising workforce diversity and stringent regulatory regimes. These factors have driven, and in turn have been driven by, an increasing complexity of products, services and the processes that create value, resulting in changes in the structural and functional dimensions of the organisation. Business executives and academics recognise the shift in value creating assets from the traditional land, labour and capital to intangible assets such as knowledge and information becoming the most important resources an organisation can muster.The combination and integration of intangible assets such as human resources, structural and relational resources has been grouped under the umbrella of intellectual capital. This study comprises of a single descriptive case study analysis to ascertain how intellectual capital is managed strategically to gain a competitive advantage in an organisation in the banking and financial services sector in Zambia. Based on document review and semi-structured interviews, this thesis investigated the extent to which an organisation in the banking and financial services sector in Zambia leveraged intellectual capital to gain competitive advantage. In this study it was found that there is a low level appreciation of the intellectual capital phenomenon as a strategic management tool in the participating organisation. However, the organisation has adopted aspects of intellectual capital and has implemented them successfully accounting for the organisation‘s competitive edge in the market.

Magister Commercii - MCom / The aim of this study is to determine the extent to which the UN/OSCAL (United Nations Office of the Special Coordinator for Africa and the Least Development Countries) model of microfinance is being applied in the South African context, its scope for application and recommendations for implementation. The hypothesis is that, the better South African microfinance initiatives conform to the model, the more successful it will be in fulfilling the ultimate mission of microfinance which is to supply financial services to the poor by cutting the cost of outreach with beneficial effects on poverty.. / South Africa

Magister Legum - LLM / This study was on the anticipated impact of GATS on the financial services industry in Africa. The paper examined the possible positive and negative impact of the GATS agreement on the financial services industry in the African countries. The research focused on the banking sector and the insurance sector as the main financial sectors under investigation. / South Africa

The research for this study was guided by the question on whether the financial inclusion improvement strategies of the South African government adequately address the financial inclusion targets, as set out in the National Development Plan. This descriptive non-empirical study was conducted by means of a literature review. The secondary data used for the study were collected from a number of sources, namely: (i) the 2015 Brookings Financial and Digital Inclusion Project report; (ii) the 2014 Global Findex survey; (iii) the InterMedia surveys; (iv) Financial Access surveys; (v) various national FinScope surveys; and (iv) a number of working papers of the World Bank related to financial inclusion. The data revealed that South Africa, with its sophisticated financial sector, was early to adopt policies and initiatives to advance financial inclusion and the country has experienced a noticeable increase in financial inclusion from 61% in 2004 to 87% in 2015. South Africa is 3% away from its National Development Plan goal of 90% financial inclusion by 2030. This indicates that overall, the financial inclusion initiatives adopted by the South African government were successful.

This dissertation consists of three parts. In the first part, we study an oligopoly model in which firms compete across several geographic regions. This networked competition is prevalent in many markets, such energy, metals, and agricultural commodity markets. Firms operating in these industries are constrained by physical limits on production capacities. Our paper provides the first analytical study on firms' competition in industries where players are capacity constrained. We find that a reduction in import-export taxes can have qualitatively different effects on consumer welfare depending on whether or not the impacted firm is capacity constrained. Our results imply that policies that promote free trade (e.g. NAFTA, European Union) may have unintended consequence and reduce the consumer surplus in capacity constrained industries. The second part of this dissertation analyzes the pros and cons of Bitcoin payment systems. The creator of Bitcoin envisioned a decentralized payment system in which mining can be performed by anyone using their home computers. Since it was introduced in 2008, Bitcoin attracted significant attention, both by public media and by investors. This led to a surge in the bitcoin price, and its market capitalization exceeded $170 billion (as of February 2, 2020). With the rise of bitcoin price, firms started to invest in developing efficient hardware to increase their probability of successfully mining blocks. As a result, mining operations became vertically integrated with single firms designing and manufacturing mining chips, and operating them in data centers. These major developments in mining technology bring up the following question: Does Bitcoin's proof-of-work protocol serve its intended purpose of enabling and supporting a decentralized payment system? We propose a two-stage game to answer this question. Firms first invest in research and development to subsequently compete in a Bitcoin mining game. We show that firms fail to capture the surplus created from their research, because higher research expenditures induce a more aggressive mining game. We calibrate our model to rewards and operational costs observed in the Bitcoin system, and quantitatively demonstrate that the mining industry has a tendency towards centralization, against the core principles of cryptocurrencies. The third part of this dissertation studies the emerging robo-advising industry. Roboadvisors are threatening traditional wealth management firms due to their ability to offer lower fees and minimum balance requirements, as well as transparent and systematic advise. Robo-advisors had $300 billion in assets under management during 2016, and are projected to reach $2.2 trillion by 2020. Currently, robo-advising firms employ questionnaires to assess the risk preference of investors. While appealing, the use of questionnaires presents various shortcomings: (i) investors' answers do not account for emotional responses observed when the loss is incurred, (ii) survey responses are subject to noise, and (iii) risk tolerance assessments are sensitive to the specific wording and formats used in questionnaires. To overcome these limitations, we propose a reinforcement learning framework for retail roboadvising. The robo-advisor does not know the investor's risk preference, but learns it over time by observing her portfolio choices in different market environments. We develop an exploration-exploitation algorithm which trades off costly solicitations of portfolio choices by the investor with autonomous trading decisions based on stale estimates of investor's risk aversion. We illustrate how, by correcting for the investor's mistakes, the robo-advisor may outperform a stand-alone investor regardless of the investor's opportunity cost for making portfolio decisions.

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Increased life expectancies and a significant reduction in the number of corporate pension plans nationwide have made the prospects of retirement a challenge for many of us. The burden of funding retirement will move from the corporation or government to the individual. Those individuals with limited financial experience will most likely need the guidance of a financial advisor. Can we trust and rely upon them? Following the 2004 late trading scandal and the 2008 financial meltdown, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority ("FINRA") implemented Continuing Education requirements at the advisor level. The intent was to improve the quality and integrity of advisors' interaction with clients. I have interviewed forty-one advisors at four separate financial services firms to examine the impact of this training on the moral obligations and responsibilities of financial advisors.

The combined environmental effects of technological change, increasing competition, new legislation and increasingly demanding consumers have created pressure within the financial services industry for change. One outcome has been a proliferation of new products in the marketplace. This research explores new product development within one subset of this industry -- building societies. By combining the new product development, service marketing and financial services literature, a foundation has been developed for an empirical study into the development practices and the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful new products. The determinants of success and failure for new product development have been examined utilizing a comparative methodology, and subsequently a discriminant model has been developed that successfully classifies successful and unsuccessful new products. By determining how new products are actually developed, the findings support previous claims that intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity and perishability do have an effect on the development process. Further, the level of sophistication of the development activities is lower than in previously reported research. Notable variations from the development process for tangible new products are the inclusion of system design, system testing and personnel training stages. The majority of societies have been found to lack strategic integration of the development process, to apply different measures of success and to prefer qualitative market research techniques over quantitative approaches. As well, considerable variation exists in the organizational approaches used to manage the process, although organizational related variables were found to have a strong impact upon the predictability of a successful outcome for a new product.

Each chapter has its own summary / Each chapter has own summary / Industrial and Organisational Psychology / M. Com. (Industrial and Organisational Psychology)