ABSTRACT
‘Financial services’ is an umbrella term for a wide range of different products and services, including day-to-day money management, saving and borrowing, insurance and investing for the future. While individuals and households deal mainly with the financial services firms located in their own country, the products they buy or invest in are the tip of a vast global network of markets. The overall size of the global financial services market is estimated to be around $22.5 trillion. The scale of the financial services industry has increased enormously in recent decades – in the United Kingdom (UK) alone doubling in real terms. The conservative governments of 1979–1987 passed financial deregulation measures that rapidly changed the UK financial landscape: breaking down barriers that had kept financial firms specialising in niche areas; breaking up industry-wide agreements that had set the level of commissions that could be charged; and so on.
