Internet & Capital raising: the perfect match?

The financial world has discovered the advantages of the Internet immediately. Financial services lend themselves perfectly to electronic media since they do not involve the movement of physical things to achieve clearance and settlement . The need for fast and up to date information has pushed financial institutions to continuously improve the way they transfer data. The dawn of the Internet has not only accelerated this, it has also made these communication channels available to individual investors and family men. The best examples of this are the thousands of websites that allow to “play” on the stock markets all over the world in real time. Individuals can place their orders directly without having to contact their banker. The more advanced individuals quit their jobs and become day-traders, inputting their orders directly into the market system and using the same Reuters screens as the big institutional players. In short, the Internet allows companies and people to do the things themselves, to bypass the traditional institutions and to do things differently. As a consequence, this will affect all aspects of the financial world: some will only face minor changes; others will change drastically with other rules and players. This research paper will discuss the relation between the Internet and the process of collecting capital. The aim of the paper is to make a thorough analysis of the influence of the Internet on this aspect of the financial world and to see whether the birth of the Internet has put the evolution of this process in a different direction.