The poverty of fintech? Psychometrics, credit infrastructures, and the limits of financialization

Nick Bernards

Review of International Political Economy, 2019, vol. 26, issue 5, 815-838

Abstract: It is increasingly common to claim that innovative financial technologies (‘fintech’) will enable ever-wider access to credit. Previous critical accounts have often linked the development of fintech to processes of financialization. However, these arguments rarely take account of the uneven and highly limited character of ‘financial inclusion’ in practice. Drawing on engagements with science and technology studies and historical materialist political economy, this article advances an approach emphasizing processes of abstraction from productive activities, mediated through particular infrastructures, as core elements of financial accumulation. Seen in this light, psychometrics in particular and alternative credit data more broadly can be seen as flawed efforts to confront three sets of limits—(1) the necessarily reductive character of abstract framings, and the consequent challenges posed by their encounter with complex processes in practice, (2) the ways that systems for credit scoring interact with the infrastructures of existing financial systems, and (3) the difficulty of realizing financial profits in the context of widespread precarious livelihoods. Looking at alternative forms of credit data from this angle offers a way of grasping the truncated and uneven rollout of fintech, and hence of prompting more critical reflections about the limits to processes of financialization.

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2019.1597753

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