Financial services

Financial services are economic services tied to finance provided by financial institutions. Financial services encompass a broad range of service sector activities, especially as concerns financial management and consumer finance.

The finance industry in its most common sense concerns commercial banks that provide market liquidity, risk instruments, and brokerage for large public companies and multinational corporations at a macroeconomic scale that impacts domestic politics and foreign relations. The extragovernmental power and scale of the finance industry remains an ongoing controversy in many industrialized Western economies, as seen in the American Occupy Wall Street civil protest movement of 2011.

Styles of financial institution includes credit union, bank, savings and loan association, trust company, building society, brokerage firm, payment processor, many types of broker, and some government-sponsored enterprise.

Financial services include accountancy, investment banking, investment management, and personal asset management.

Financial products include insurance, credit cards, mortgage loans, and pension funds.

The term "financial services" became more prevalent in the United States partly as a result of the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of the late 1990s, which enabled different types of companies operating in the U.S. financial services industry at that time to merge.

Companies usually have two distinct approaches to this new type of business. One approach would be a bank that simply buys an insurance company or an investment bank, keeps the original brands of the acquired firm, and adds the acquisition to its holding company simply to diversify its earnings. Outside the U.S. (e.g. Japan), non-financial services companies are permitted within the holding company. In this scenario, each company still looks independent and has its own customers, etc. In the other style, a bank would simply create its own insurance division or brokerage division and attempt to sell those products to its own existing customers, with incentives for combining all things with one company.^{[citation needed]}

The financial sector is traditionally among those to receive government support in times of widespread economic crisis. Such bailouts, however, enjoy less public support than those for other industries.