The thesis examines international remittances (i.e. cross‑border payments sent by migrant workers) from the perspective of existing or potential service providers. It explains their economic significance and impact, characterizes the consumers involved with remittances and their behavior, describes the remittance process, and classifies and compares remittance transfer mechanisms. It also analyzes global remittance flows and the consumers’ cost. Furthermore, it summarizes the results of remittance provision market research, selects and reviews representative examples of existing services, and identifies categories of providers. The thesis then evaluates the strategic positions of existing types of services, and identifies factors that should distinguish successful providers. Finally, it assesses the business opportunity for new technology providers.

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The number of credit cards issued and used in the Czech Republic is increasing quickly, and these figures are worth a closer inspection. […]

This paper surveys the literature on the costs and benefits of entering a monetary union. […]

The fall of Enron and subsequent large corporate scandals provoked a relatively quick response from policy makers all over the world. […]

The purpose of this credit application is to obtain a financing for a hypothetical long-term investment project. […]

The thesis describes the concept of retail electronic money (also referred to as stored value), provides a brief evolutionary overview of prepaid electronic payment instruments, and tries to reconstruct the development process of the new payment methods. Four types of schemes that exist in the EU and the USA—multipurpose prepaid cards, prepaid dedicated accounts, person‑to‑person online payment services and mobile customer accounts—are described. Subsequently, an overview of current trends and future prospects is presented. In a more theoretical manner, the development of prepaid schemes is put into the broader perspective of the evolution of payment systems in general, and the process of innovation. Based on that, several conceptual barriers to their adoption are suggested. Finally, regulatory environments in the EU and the USA are described and compared. The thesis aims to analyze the current and potential trends and their implications for payment systems.

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Uncertainty is an increasingly important factor in strategic analysis. As many researchers and practitioners found out, traditional analytical tools, which try to predict the future, seldom provide sufficient capability to account for the complexity of a highly uncertain environment. […]

Business process outsourcing (BPO) benefits both the client and the service provider. For the client, the benefits can be significantly greater than the cost savings from the pure information technology (IT) outsourcing frequently deployed in the past. […]

Using the figures of fiscal years 2000–2002 the analysis summarizes the key financial indicators and predicts their changes in the consequent periods. […]