No abstract

Highlights Roboadvisors discipline investors to become passive financial subjects. Roboadvisors’ opaque algorithms create greater investor uncertainty. Automated investing may hamper financial literacy and education. State-led initiatives may encourage further financialization of consumers.

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalisation efforts in many countries as they try to contain the virus. With the physical handling of cash posing as a potential virus transmission risk, digital payments have become important in the urgent transition to a cashless society and a key feature of smart city projects. Critical analyses have typically framed smart cities as neoliberalist developmental projects that see the partnering of the state with private corporations. However, it is unclear how the smart city emerges under the technocratic inclinations of the developmental state. Focusing on the digital payments project under Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative, this paper unpacks the discursive practices employed in mobilising citizen support for electronic payments through a critical analysis of publicly available government materials and recent initiatives. The discourse surrounding digital payments is bound up in narratives surrounding economic competitiveness, technological progress and public health and safety, and strongly rooted in a technocratic governance ethos that limits genuine citizen participation in shaping smart payments technologies. This paper argues that such discursive framings represent a missed opportunity to build a smart city that is truly citizen-centric. This reorientation requires more bottom-up and grassroots-based modes of governance that reformulate smart citizenship into one that pays greater attention to the affective and social contexts behind digital technologies.

The rising popularity of fintech‐driven solutions has reshaped financial markets and retail consumer behaviour. This paper examines the growing ‘buy‐now‐pay‐later’ (BNPL) phenomenon as a novel, platform‐driven financial innovation to understand how this digitally mediated economic arrangement has produced new financial subjects and subjectivities. Using the idea of ‘platform ecologies’ that combines the relational focus of financial ecologies with the logics of platform finance, this study highlights how the intermediary role of BNPL services has reshaped relational monetary practices through algorithmically driven modes of operating. Analysing Singapore's nascent BNPL landscape through content analysis of BNPL firm websites and critical media coverage of BNPL, this paper shows how automated technologies of risk assessment and debt collection are deployed to govern borrowers and keep them digitally attached to their debts, where creditworthiness is continuously evaluated in response to user transaction and repayment data. The strategic use of affect in framing BNPL services to satisfy immediate materialist consumption masks the fundamental nature of BNPL as debt, while the targeting of young individuals with no credit history through opaque techniques of credit and risk management creates new indebted subjects. The implications of such data‐driven practices in producing greater indebtedness and further shaping financial subjectivities are discussed.

It is widely claimed that financial technology democratizes financial access and promotes financial inclusion. This paper challenges this dominant narrative of financial technology using the popular US-based mobile investing platform Robinhood as a case study. Analyzing press articles on Robinhood and regulatory filings of online brokerages, the concepts of financial infrastructures and platforms are used to unpack the capitalist logics that drive the platform business model. Specifically, this paper shows how digital interface design plays a central role in Robinhood's articulation of investors into the stock markets, through its simple, minimalist app that keeps users engaged by the productive management of ‘frictions’. The ease of investing via platform-based brokerages has seen investors taking on greater amounts of risk. This paper argues that Robinhood's success is driven by the continued expansion of its user base using various interface design techniques. This allows platform capitalism to be enacted by extracting rent through various revenue streams, where higher rents are derived from more frequent and riskier trading behaviors. The narrative of democratizing finance as employed widely in the financial technology sector thus obscures the capitalist logics and predatory practices that underlie financial technology.