Over the last decade or so, firms in the financial services industry witnessed fundamental changes in their operating environment, such as deregulation, internationalization, technological innovations, mergers and acquisitions, and more recently a global financial crisis. This book discusses various issues that relate to those changes, while placing particular emphasis on aspects of efficiency and risk management. Topics that are discussed in the book include among others, mergers and acquisitions, liquidity in the interbank market, the evaluation of bank performance with multicriteria decision aid and frontier techniques, value-at-risk modeling, central clearing counterparties, mutual funds, and derivatives and earnings management.