Information technology and financial services  Today's Forum focuses on information and financial services. Indeed, financial activities make full use of wide-ranging information technologies created throughout human history, and financial industries have almost always developed parallel to advances in various techniques and infrastructure related to information processing.
Money, which constitutes the basic infrastructure for financial activities, physically symbolizes information pertaining to value in the form of metal or paper by using relevant technologies, thereby enabling the exchange and preservation of value. Moreover, money attaches information on “price,” which is based on a widely-shared common “scale,” to various goods and services.