These structural changes have heightened competition, resulting in market efficiencies that continue to help drive down costs and foster the  emergence of increasingly diverse and highly specialized organizations. These entities range from banks and brokerage firms that offer their services exclusively through electronically based delivery mechanisms to locally based public-private partnerships that provide counseling and financing arrangements to low- and moderate-income families.
Corporations, for example, often allow employees to self-direct their investments in pension and other benefit plans, whereas employers dictated such decisions twenty years ago. The advent of on-line brokerage firms has enabled individual investors to directly conduct stock transactions. The role of financial education However beneficial, constant change, of course, can be unsettling, and one challenge we face is overcoming such anxieties.