Narratives of FinTech: The Languages of Efficiency and Hierarchy

New financial technologies (fintech) have been lauded an opportunity to improve the efficiency of the financial system and to promote inclusion, especially in the developing world. They have also been framed as a potential risk for individual consumers (e.g. privacy) or to financial stability more broadly. Yet, in addition to these economic narratives, the advent of fintech has also kindled political discussions about its implications, from risk-washing to financial democratization, as well as a potential avenue to contest political and geopolitical power structures by a wide range of actors. The objective of this paper is to develop a theory of narratives of finance by leveraging computationally assisted text analysis and grounded theory across three corpora, each consisting of English-language texts on fintech collected automatically from various online sources. The first concerns statements by speeches and press-statements from country representatives in finance-related international institutions and forums such as the International Monetary Fund, the G-20, World Economic Forum, and the BRICS+ summits. The second corresponds to abstracts of academic articles with keywords related to fintech. Finally, the third will consist of a global sample of news articles with fintech-related keywords. The ex-ante hypothesis guiding the data collection strategy and initial analysis is that narratives of fintech broadly overlap with narratives regarding the (US-led) international financial system, categorizing it as a zero-sum or positive-sum game. The first analytical stage will test whether unsupervised machine learning algorithms (e.g. structural topic models) uncover latent themes in the corpora which correspond with this dichotomy and if the prevalence of such topics correlates coded attitudes of actors towards the international financial system. For example, actors classified as hostile towards the system (zero-sum view) are expected to more heavily use terms that emphasize hierarchy (e.g. sovereignty, hegemony) whereas less hostile actors (positive-sum view) are expected to utilize the language of efficiency (risk, growth) at higher rates. The second analytical stage will consist of determining a small sample of representative documents from each of the three corpora and performing an in-depth qualitative content analysis to refine the initial hypotheses and develop a classification of narratives of fintech through induction. The expected content of these representative texts is that positive-sum views are conceptually emphasize individual agency whereas zero-sum views emphasize structural constraints. This would suggest a deep epistemological divide across different levels of society when it comes to the understanding of fintech and finance. The expected contributions of this study are twofold. The first is methodological as is proposes a framework through which theory building can be achieved by combining qualitative (small-n) and computational text analysis (large-n) methods in a meaningful way. The second is substantive. Empirical support for the existence of two mutually exclusive narratives of finance across policy, industry, and academia can set the groundwork for new research on how to bridge this longstanding gap and to determine the mechanisms that drive it.