The accelerating transformation of the financial services industry, and the emergence of alternative financial intermediaries, have profound medium- and long-term implications for global financial markets and their supervision.

Financial intermediaries who channel funds from investors to people and institutions who require capital have expanded far beyond the traditional banking sector in recent years and now exert growing influence on global financial markets. Such entities encompass investment banks, broker-dealers, life insurance companies, mutual and pension funds, mortgage finance, credit card companies, and other types of shadow banks, all of which operate in different ways and at different scales, often with strong regional variations. Alternative channels to traditional market- and bank-financing are now major sources of funds in both developing and developed economies.

This increasingly diverse global marketplace for financial intermediation – coupled with ongoing reexamination of the role of traditional intermediaries in the wake of the financial crisis – raises important societal issues. These include the duties financial intermediaries owe to those with whom they transact business; whether banks can meet the rapidly developing needs of their traditional customers; the future of fair and effective markets; the continuing challenge of shadow banking and securitization; and the tension between societal notions of fairness and economic notions of efficiency.

From a regulatory and supervisory standpoint, as financial markets struggle to fully recover from the 2008 crisis, the imperative to strengthen the safety and soundness of intermediaries by tightening international and domestic prudential standards (as embodied in Basel III, the Dodd FrankAct and various European Union and other initiatives) may increasingly conflict with the macroeconomic priority to restore growth. As a result, understanding the new dynamics of financial intermediation, and how they influence global markets, will be critical for future resilience, credit flows and the sustainability of the financial services industry.

From a technological point of view, new and potentially disruptive innovations, cyber-security risks, privacy concerns about data protection and data theft, and new types of financial crime, present difficult challenges for future regulatory action in an interconnected and borderless financial services marketplace. Assessing the potential impact of these trends on market structure, secondary market trading, and raising funds in the capital markets, as well as the scale of investments required by banks to keep pace with new technologies and the constraints the latter will place on traditional intermediaries, are matters of increasingly strategic concern.

Leading voices across the financial services sector are starting to confront the magnitude of these emerging challenges and their potential to radically alter relationships along the transaction chain.The 2015 Salzburg Forum on Finance in a Changing World will therefore explore the long-term systemic changes taking place in global financial markets, the future of regional regulatory action, and the technology-driven shifts that are impacting the global financial services industry.

The session will bring together participants from financial services firms,alternative financial intermediaries; policy makers; regulators and supervisors (including securities regulators); and consultancy and technology firms.

The registration deadline is Friday, June 12, 2015.