Bernardo Batiz-Lazo read economics at ITAM, Mexico, and Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain; history at the University of Oxford, UK, and received a doctorate in business administration from Manchester Business School, UK). He has been studying financial markets and institutions since 1988. He joined the University of Bangor as Professor of Business History and Bank Management after appointments in Leicester, UK; the Open University, UK, and Queen's University of Belfast, Ireland. He has combined full time appointments with consulting and executive training in Europe, the Gulf states, Latin America and Asia. Bernardo has written over 35 refereed articles, 3 books and 8 distance learning books. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, research associate of Fundación Estudios Financieros (Fundef – ITAM), and edits a weekly report on new working papers in payments and financial technology (see http://lists.repec.org/mailman/listinfo/nep-pay).
Leonidas Efthymiou is coordinator of the Business Department at Intercollege Larnaca, Cyprus, and lecturer at UNICAF, Cyprus, since 2010. He received his PhD from the University of Leicester, UK, in 2011 through an ethnographic study on workplace control and resistance. His PhD thesis received the 2012 Best Dissertation award at the Academy of Management meeting, held in Boston, USA. He is interested in a wide range of business phenomena, varying from service workers performing emotional, affective and aesthetic labour to cashless payments in the context of corporate legitimacy and sociology of finance. His recent publications examine the role of payment infrastructures during banking shutdowns, insolvencies and bank-runs.