The American non-profit organization Project Management Institute has for several years compiled a list of the most important projects in human history. Among the chosen ones are the most famous and influential of them, who have made a breakthrough in their field and thereby irrevocably changed it.
Projects can range from engineering to healthcare, from farming to video games, from logistics to architecture. They were chosen from a list of more than 1000 titles by leading experts of the field, academics and journalists. And we will tell you about the 10 most influential financial projects from the world list.
10. E-Trade
It's hard to believe now, but back in the early 90s, trading stocks over the Internet using a personal computer was considered something of a fantasy. E-Trade has made a dream come true. Already in 1991, she launched the first online trading program. And by the end of 2018, the company had 4.9 million brokerage accounts, 282 thousand with a small amount of transactions per year and 30 branches around the world.
9. John Bogle Index Fund
When John Bogle, founder of investment firm The Vanguard Group, decided to create the world's first index fund and make it available to the general public, other financiers twisted their fingers to their temples. He was considered insane, and his initiative was called "Bogle's Foolishness."
But Bogle had the last laugh. Not only did he win in the financial arena - over the years, his company's assets grew from $ 1.8 billion to $ 600 billion - but with his innovation he made investing easier and more profitable for ordinary people.
8. Venmo
This mobile application was launched in 2009 and has made online payments much easier. With its help, people could transfer funds from one account of the application to another. True, both the sender and the receiver needed to live in the United States.
Currently, the application is used by about 40 million people. It is owned by PayPal. However, due to the fact that the connection is peer-to-peer, personal information may leak. To prevent this, the company regularly modifies its security protocols.
7. Shanghai Stock Exchange
China is a strange mixture between capitalism and worship of the red banner and Mao's grandfather. The Chinese do not mind working and earning, including trading on the stock exchange, but they want to do it on their own terms.
The Shanghai Stock Exchange is an example of this. It was opened in 1990, almost half a century after the communist revolution in China. Now the exchange has become the largest in the entire country, and in terms of the volume of transactions, it has become the fourth in the world.
6. Nasdaq
The first stock market to replace the traditional trading floor with an automated computer network.
This innovative solution has made Nasdaq the second largest stock exchange in the world; at the moment it is second only to New York. She mainly specializes in high technologies: electronics, software, computer solutions and so on. At the moment, more than 3,000 companies are trading shares on this site.
5. COSMOS Package Tracking System
FedEx is one of the rare brands that have long since merged into the service they provide in social creation. For many Americans, fedex means overnight delivery.And it all happened thanks to one project that resulted in an entire delivery tracking system that revolutionized e-commerce.
COSMOS is an online system for customers, transactions and services that allows customers to track their packages all the way from supplier to customer. The simplicity, convenience and transparency of the system have significantly increased the popularity of online shopping. Why, thanks to Cosmos, such trading giants as, for example, Amazon were born.
4. Bitcoin
In 2008, a programmer under the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto" published a text in which he expressed the idea of creating a digital currency. It must be completely secure, confidential, and completely transparent.
And Nakamoto put his idea into practice. A mysterious programmer mined the first block of bitcoins, and also created a way to track each of them - blockchain, p2p network. Each bitcoin travel point is viewable by any user of the network. So the author of bitcoins completely secured his brainchild from counterfeiting. And all this happened without the slightest involvement of governments, banks and other financial institutions. Over the years, the popularity of both Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed, making Bitcoin one of the most influential business projects in the world.
3. M-Pesa Mobile Microfinancing Platform
M-Pesa opens the top three among the most influential financial projects over the past 50 years. Experts believe this is one of the most cutting-edge initiatives in remittance, finance and microfinance - all powered by mobile.
The project was launched in 2007 by Safaricom, which is owned by communications provider Vodafone and the Kenyan government. Since its launch, the M-Pesa system has expanded to six other countries, including Tanzania, Egypt and Ghana. With its help, Africans pay wages, book tickets, pay bills, insurance, issue loans and much, much more.
2. Alibaba Singles Day
What Russian does not like to shop in China! And especially dear to our compatriots is the day of November 11 (11/11), known as "Singles Day", when the megaconcern of online shopping Alibaba Group is holding the biggest sale of the year.
Alibaba Singles Day's sales statistics are staggering. Last year, goods were sold for a total of US $ 38.4 billion. Moreover, the record of the previous year, 2018, was surpassed by almost 26%! For comparison, these figures are more than 2.5 times higher than the sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States of the same year.
1. Euro
The most important among financial projects, according to the Project Management Institute, is the introduction of the euro. And no wonder: the euro is the national currency of 19 member states of the European Union; in total, 343 million people live in the “eurozone”. In many of the countries of the European Union, the new monetary unit either exists alongside the national one, or has long supplanted the “indigenous people”. And in countries that are not directly affected by monetary unification and are not members of the EU, the euro exists as a reserve currency along with the US dollar.
The introduction of the euro is not easy and took literally decades. Financiers started thinking about a common European monetary unit already in the mid-70s, but real steps in this direction began to take place after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty on the creation of the EU in 1992. And the first countries joined the Eurospace only 7 years later.
Undoubtedly, the creation of the European Union and the emergence of a new common currency symbol radically changed the work of many financial systems in European countries. And the goal of creating the euro as a competitor to the dollar, despite all the financial crises that regularly shake the EU, was generally achieved. At the moment, the share of the dollar in world trade is 40%, and the share of the euro lags behind it by some 5%.35% of all transactions are paid in euros.