Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to highlight the potentials offered by New Product Committees for the development of responsible innovation in the financial services industry; and to provide grounds for policy recommendations. Design/methodology/approach -The paper takes the form of collective, interdisciplinary reflection and experience within the industry. Findings -New Product Committees can serve a practical approach to responsible innovation in finance. Originality/value -The paper fills a gap in the empirical consideration of New Product Committees in the financial services industry and proposes original directions for policy orientations within organizations and at a regulatory level.

Conflicting codes and codings: how algorithmic trading is reshaping financial regulation 'Two hundred fifty milliseconds are hardly noticeable while talking, but it's long enough for a crowd to get ahead of you in the market'

In this article, we make sense of financial algorithms as new objects of concern for organizational ethnography. We conceive of algorithms as ‘objects of ignorance’ jeopardizing traditional ethnography from the perspective of its categories and methods. We investigate the organizational politics taking place within high-frequency trading – a sub-field of algorithmic trading where automated decision-making without human direction has reached a peak, and show that financial algorithms raise particular epistemic and methodological challenges for practitioners and ethnographers alike. Consequently, we develop a typology for various interpretations of algorithms as ethnographic objects, accounting for their structural ignorance and shedding light on a continuum of the changing human-machine/trader-algorithm relation. To this end, we use the concepts of ‘quasi-object’ and ‘quasi-subject’ as developed by Michel Serres, and make the point that in order to study financial algorithms ethnographically, we need to think anew the dynamic relationship they embody, and acknowledge their constitutive heterogeneity.

Developing an agenda for social studies of High-Frequency trading (HFT), this paper introduces the culture(s) of HFT as a sociological problem of dealing with knowledge and practice. High-Frequency trading is often discussed as a purely technological development where all that matters is the speed of allocating, processing and transmitting data. Indeed, the speed of executing a trade and data transmission is accelerating and it is fair to say that algorithms are now the interacting agents preprogramed to operate in the financial markets. However, we make the point that HFT is first and foremost a cultural phenomenon. More specifically, both individuals and collective agentssuch as algorithmsmight be considered cultural entities charged with very different ways of processing information, making sense of it and turning it into knowledge and practice. This puts forward issues relating to situated knowledge, distributed cognition and action, the assignment of responsibility when regulating high-speed algorithms, their history, organizational structure and perhaps more fundamentally, their representation.

ChemInform Abstract A general vacancy model for the structure of phyllomanganates(IV) of general formula (Mn4+ n-1O2n)Ax•yH2O has been developed and tested for a wide range of compounds containing various A cations in oxidation states of Z = +1 to +3, using ew syntheses and a review of compositions. The presence of Mn3+ is confirmed by optical spectroscopy. In agreement with available structural data and IR spectra, all known hydrated phyllomanganates fit a model containing 1/6, 1/7, or 1/9 Mn4+ vacancies in CdI2-type MnO2) layers and x interlayer sites (per Mn4+ vacancy) occupied by A (x = 2 for Z ≥ 2). Monovalent A cations can occupy additional sites depending on their size (x: up to 4 for Na+, and up to 3 for K+).