It was a real privilege to give a Keynote at the Intersections of Finance and Society 2023 conference last week. I have been reading the work of many researchers in this group but only just met many of them in-person for the first time, and it was rather nice to hear a few of them say the same to me as well! It was a bit of tough act following after the first two keynotes who were both very charismatic speakers (economist Daniela Gabor and historian Quinn Slobodian) but also glad to be flying the geographer flag at this interdisciplinary gathering of finance scholars.
In the keynote, I reflected on the shift from an emphasis on new technologies to an emphasis on life (i.e. lifestyles, aspirations, daily routines) in the types of actors, socio-technical knowledge and business practices emerging from the consumer finance sector. Rather than just the addition or stacking of new players, technologies, services etc. perhaps what we are seeing is more of a complex mixing and reconfiguration of roles and relationships between what/who we might consider to be relevant or powerful actors, institutions, technologies, products and services… in the financial space. Instead of the fintech cube that featured in my earlier paper (with Michael Samers) on the economic geographies of fintech1, this leads me to think about a Rubiks cube with many twists and turns that lead to many different outcomes and possibilities. One aspect of these reconfigurations and shifts is how ‘tech’ and ‘finance’ fades into the background as enablers, while lifestyles, life goals, aspirations and subjectivities become foregrounded in the curation, delivery and consumption of banking and finance, and what are the implications for how we might research on finance, fintech and everyday life.
Some of the materials in the Keynote are drawn from recent work on gamification in consumer fintech, which has just been published in Geoforum. In that paper (co-authored with Paul Langley)2, we make particular arguments about a shift towards ‘attention economies’ and how user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design and other types of specialist socio-technical knowledges are important in how we understand the reintermediation of finance. The paper will form part of a special issue (co-edited with David Bassens, Reijer Hendrikse and Michiel van Meeteren) about the changing intersections of finance and what might be considered ‘advanced producer services’ or ‘advanced business services’ in an age of platform capitalism.
I am in the process of writing up these thoughts into a FinGeo blog and will update later when that is available. My thanks to kind colleagues for the photos here.
1 Lai, Karen P.Y. and Samers, Michael (2021) ‘Towards an economic geography of FinTech‘, Progress in Human Geography, Volume 45, Issue 4, pp. 720-739, DOI: 10.1177/0309132520938461.
2 Lai, Karen P. Y. and Langley, Paul (2023) ‘Playful finance: Gamification and intermediation in FinTech economies‘, Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103848.
Karen P.Y. Lai 