Talk:Financial services

Forbes 25
This was the original text. It's not the largest financial services firms, it's just the largest firms. I don't know what that's supposed to show, it should probably have been accompanied by a mention of their market share in the industries they operate.--Jerryseinfeld 04:07, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

To illustrate this, these (according to Forbes magazine) are the top 25 companies in the world, ranked by a balanced mixture of profit (technically income) revenues, market capitalization, and assets:

Guide: Company name (industry)


 * Citigroup (financial services)
 * General Electric (holding company, but has large financial services division)
 * American International Group (financial services)
 * ExxonMobil (oil)
 * Bank of America (financial services)
 * Royal Dutch/Shell Group (oil)
 * BP (oil)
 * Fannie Mae (financial services)
 * HSBC Group (financial services)
 * Toyota Motor (cars and financial services (owns a bank))
 * Verizon Communications (telecommunications)
 * Wal-Mart (retail stores)
 * ING Group (financial services)
 * Royal Bank of Scotland (financial services)
 * Berkshire Hathaway (holding company, main division is financial services)
 * BNP Paribas (financial services)
 * International Business Machines (computers)
 * Altria Group (argicultural and brand name holding company)
 * General Motors (cars and financial services, it makes twice as much profit from financial services then it does cars)
 * Freddie Mac (financial services)
 * UBS (financial services)
 * JP Morgan Chase & Co (financial services)
 * Wells Fargo (financial services)
 * DaimlerChrysler (cars)

That listing is supposed to show the possibly suprising phenomenon that, out of the top 25 largest companies in the world, how many are financial services companies.

Improvement Drive
The article Grameen Bank is currently nominated to be improved on This week's improvement drive. Support this article with your vote.--Fenice 17:19, 13 August 2005 (UTC) Relevance of NBFC's are not mentioned...210.212.233.131 (talk) 04:57, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Gibberish
I have removed the nonsense shown below as I feel it is unlikely to help anyone. Most likely it was cut and pasted from some website where it may have had context. Hopefully someone can come up with a better introduction to the types of industry in financial services. Simonthebold 18:03, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Industries
"Industries" in the "industry". Product set of financial services firms. The core products are transaction services (customers are consumer and corporate), trading and derivatives (consumer and corporate), debt & equity structuring (structured finance) (corporate), asset management (consumer and corporate), financing (debt & equity) (consumer debt, corporate debt & equity), advisory (on M&A and integrated in other products, for example structured finance and derivatives) (corporate), insurance (consumer and corporate).''

Hmmm, good call on the gibberish, but now the Industries info doesn't make a lot of sense once you get down to EDC & GE. Secretagentwang 20:42, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

There's got to be a distinction between financial products and financial planning consultants. That categorization is useful to understand the way in which the various branches/services etc. are operating around the globe. If I were to very broadly categorise in as few categories as possible, then what would they be? Context is important, of course, but for a start, I would suggest this: "Financial Products Providers, Financial Planning Consultants." In these two categories, the whole gamut has been covered. Please let me know if I have erred. My name is "Objective?" Thank You.

Company Lists - Link Farm
Do we really want this article to mainly consist of company lists? It has become a link farm and there is no definition on what constitutes a "notable" company. As long as we're on this path, this article is likely to be nothing more.

I propose we take one of two approaches:
 * Remove all internal and external links to specific companies, and retain the links to related topics (insurance, etc.) so the article is encyclopedic and ceases to be advertising.
 * OR

--Pearrari (talk) 14:26, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Set a very specific bar (top 5 or 10 companies - for insurance, by revenue; for banks, by assets managed, etc.) and enforce that so we don't wind up with a list of 1000+ links here.
 * I'm going to remove the internal and external linkfarm which seems to have turned into a giant 'See also' list. Any desired list of banks can be made into its own separate article or people can refer to List of banks.  Barkeep   Chat 17:42, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

This is an articla about FINANCE CAPITAL. To better understand the essence of it read: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin — Preceding unsigned comment added by 8.225.200.133 (talk) 22:33, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
 * No its not, and why? noq (talk) 23:45, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Dr. Chakravorti's comment on this article
Dr. Chakravorti has reviewed this Wikipedia page, and provided us with the following comments to improve its quality:

"This is a tough section to write. The writeup includes a good categorization of products. I would like to see more on non-financial institution involvement in financial services by tech companies, merchants, and other entities.  Also the financial services industry is a heavily regulated industry.  Why is that?  A discussion of positive and negative externalities would be useful to understand why some of these institutions are bailed out in crises.  I also don't believe that Citigroup is the largest company by market cap or assets any more."

We hope Wikipedians on this talk page can take advantage of these comments and improve the quality of the article accordingly.

We believe Dr. Chakravorti has expertise on the topic of this article, since he has published relevant scholarly research:


 * Reference : Wilko Bolt & Sujit Chakravorti, 2008. "Economics of Payment Cards: A Status Report," DNB Working Papers 193, Netherlands Central Bank, Research Department.

ExpertIdeasBot (talk) 15:27, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

WHEN DO STOCK BROKERS OR INSURANCE BROKER NORMALLY SELL SHARES — Preceding unsigned comment added by 182.236.116.162 (talk) 00:48, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Major refactor of lead
I've been using Wikipedia to manage the growth of my own personal knowledge base (PBK) for a decade now (it's also MediaWiki) and I don't think I was ever steered quite as badly as by the previous lead here.

There were two main reasons, and one minor reason.

The first major reason was that finance industry redirected here, which made it seem like a top-level umbrella page.

The second major reason was that it failed to cross-link to financial institution, and provided a duplicate list, with worse organization.

The minor reason is that the target page titles are themselves a hodge-podge, being variously titled as institutions, services, or products, but spanning the spectrum of all three aspects, regardless.

When a lead is constructed mainly out of lists of links to elsewhere, there's a limit to how much conformity one can impose without finally obscuring the mess on the other side.

Here's where I wound up when I back-ported sanity achieved in my own PBK to the article here.

Financial services are economic services tied to finance provided by financial institutions. Financial services encompass a broad range of service sector activities, especially as concerns financial management and consumer finance.

The finance industry in its most common sense concerns national banks and large commercial banks who provide market liquidity, risk instruments, and brokerage for large public companies and multinational corporations at a macroeconomic scale that impacts domestic politics and foreign relations. The extragovernmental clout and scale of the finance industry remain an ongoing controversy in many industrialized Western economies, as seen in the American Occupy Wall Street civil protest movement of 2011. Styles of financial institution include credit union, bank, savings and loan association, trust company, building society, brokerage firm, payment processor, many types of broker, and some government-sponsored enterprise.

Financial services include accountancy, investment banking, investment management, and personal asset management.

Financial products include insurance, credit cards, mortgage loans, and pension funds.

I'm not claiming this is a work of art, but it at least provides a clear structure from which to move forward. Additionally, many of the lists are now more complete.

From my perspective, it's really not acceptable that finance industry redirects here, or to finance, either. The financial industry is wagging the dog on a multinational level, often at a scale where they can intimidate national governments, sometimes even the American government. National governments have to band together at the G7 or G20 level to exert enough counter-clout to get many of these firms to pay taxes anywhere at levels comparable to smaller firms.

This is a huge, central subject matter in the modern world order.

The finance article is not a good home, either, because finance is a vast, sprawling, technical subject area.

In any case, I primarily edit Wikipedia as a byproduct of maintaining my own PBK, and I don't stick around to continue debate, as I have many thousands of other pages remaining on my visitation list.

Revise or revert as you see fit. &mdash; MaxEnt 03:46, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

Industries, worthy and unworthy
As a footnote to my previous comment, here's my own list of industries, split by which ones get their own page, and which ones are forced to cohabit.


 * worthy


 * tobacco industry
 * alcohol industry
 * sex industry
 * food industry
 * fishing industry
 * healthcare industry
 * energy industry
 * military–industrial complex
 * arms industry
 * automotive industry
 * bicycle industry
 * video game industry
 * telecommunications industry
 * pharmaceutical industry
 * semiconductor industry
 * advertising industry
 * language industry


 * unworthy


 * steel industry — redirects to subsection
 * mining industry — redirects to subsection
 * fashion industry — redirect to subsection
 * entertainment industry — redirects to subsection


 * extremely unworthy


 * aviation industry — redirects to aerospace manufacturer
 * finance industry — redirects to financial services

&mdash; MaxEnt 03:59, 30 October 2023 (UTC)