Financial services have developed with the support of such information infrastructure. Financial intermediation, such as bank lending, has made full use of borrowers' information shared through ledgers and corporate accounting.
Payments and settlements of business transactions as well as financial transactions in modern economies and financial markets have largely been processed through bank deposit transfers and securities transfers based on centralized ledgers and book-entry systems. From the perspective of information processing, payments and settlements relieve economic entities from burdensome information management, such as credit risk management of accounts receivables stemming from past transactions.