Fintech Futures

This event was held on Tuesday 5 September 2023

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Join us for this public lecture exploring the interface between finance, digital technology and everyday life.

Navigating the world of finance, credit and debt has become a normalised and unavoidable feature of young people’s lives. Financial technologies (fintech) represent a significant shift in the economic landscape, and the rapid pace of their development has outstripped both research and regulatory efforts. While some of the regulatory challenges posed by fintech have been mapped out, little is known about how people engage with fintech, including the specific financial information that they access and how fintech shapes their financial practices and sense of wellbeing.

Digitisation is changing how everyday finances and services are organised and experienced. Buy now pay later (BNPL) services have changed modes of payment and (mis)understandings of debt, but also opened young people to be able to engage with financial instruments easily. Share trading apps such as Raiz and Robinhood, Crypto platforms CoinSpot and Binance, Gambling companies like Sportsbet and bet365 are readily accessible after a few clicks. Algorithms are making decisions about who can access housing or insurance, and these decisions result in the perpetuation of geodemographic, socio-demographic and racial inequalities. Algorithms and artificial intelligence are performing much of the sorting - that is, excluding - of who can and cannot use these products.

Social science research needs to be at the forefront of understanding the intersection between the frontstage consumption of fintech and the backstage data-fied processes of evaluation and sorting of access to financial instruments in order to understand how inequality will be shaped in the future; specifically, who can access the financial and credit services that are crucial for young people to create a future. In terms of who is defined as a person of value, not all financialised subjectivities will be equal.

This seminar will critically interrogate different aspects of fintech, from data-fied digital decisions to how value is created and extracted from platforms, and from gamified debt to the sociality of gambling. In so doing it will position social science research at the forefront of understanding fintech futures.

Please join us in X101 on Level 1 of NUSpace, at the University of Newcastle's City Campus.

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Event Information

  • Date:  This event was held on Tuesday 5 September 2023
  • Location: X101, Level 1 NUSpace NUSpace, University of Newcastle City Campus Cnr Auckland and Hunter St Newcastle, NSW 2300