Platformed care in the age of fintech: the moral promise of consumer credit

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growth in lenders using digital data and platforms to reach consumers and inform lending decisions. Scholarship on these fintech (financial technology) lenders has shown how they accumulate profit and data from financialised subjects. I extend this scholarship by attending to a less studied aspect of fintech: the moral promises that industry actors make about the ability of fintech to improve people's lives. Across three interconnected sites, I examine how fintech reshapes the moral meanings of consumer credit through digital data, platforms and these promises. In this thesis, I draw on the anthropology and sociology of morality, economic anthropology and sociology, science and technology studies (STS), and critical data studies. I show how fintech lenders re-moralise consumer credit as morally acceptable for both themselves and borrowers by examining the affordances of digital platforms and associated websites and documents across three sites. I argue this re-moralisation occurs through a process that reconfigures fintechs as caring providers and borrowers as careful and caring consumers. This process, which I term platformed care, primarily relies on fintech actors constructing and maintaining the datafied consumer - the continual re-contextualisation of consumer data for multiple audiences. Through the datafied consumer, fintech lenders assume the burden of care through the digital platform. Although care is often considered benevolent, scholars in STS and other disciplines have shown that care is fraught with tension and is profoundly political. I argue that platformed care positions the fintech platform and its users as partners, albeit unequal and dependent, in achieving a future financed by fintech credit. In the first site, I examine buy now, pay later (BNPL) fintechs. These fintechs, which offer a contentious form of credit-as-payment, use platform affordances to promise responsible consumption through their intermediary position in the purchase-payment chain. In the second, I examine online lenders that promise financial health for young adults. By combining platform affordances with a metaphorical reference to physical health, these fintechs re-moralise access to credit as essential to the good life, thus managing the moral stigma associated with credit and generating demand. In the final site, I examine a key infrastructure: the Australian Government's Consumer Data Right (CDR), which is positioned as the morally preferable way for companies such as fintech lenders to access consumer data. Through the CDR, the government and data intermediaries work to morally attach consumers and fintechs to financial data by promising a better financial future through data. Together, these three sites elucidate how the fintech assemblage re-moralises consumer credit. As fintech platforms and their data-driven algorithmic design increasingly dominate our financialised lives, we need to examine how these platforms and data are used to promise sociodigital futures that are enacted in the present. By examining the moral and political implications that extend down the fintech stack, this thesis contributes to conceptual and empirical work on digital data, platforms and financialisation. Show more