Platform lending and the politics of financial infrastructures

Abstract

Online platform lending is typically understood as a challenge to incumbent banking institutions. Since its inception platform lending has been closely associated with particular financial and digital technological innovations that are thought to be changing how people engage in lending and borrowing around the world. In this article, I emphasize the deeply political aspect of these innovations. I claim that the platform lending model is built on the ostensible ‘infrastructural quality’ of credit providers across a number of national contexts. This helps explain why platform lending has emerged in its current form and why the firms involved tend to have a certain attachment to and association with the perceived merits of financial inclusion policy initiatives. The article further seeks to show that this infrastructural quality is politically contestable. When the politics of claims to infrastructure are taken seriously it is possible to demonstrate how platform lending, in spite of the ‘alternative’ and ‘democratizing’ discourses that surround the sector, is in fact built upon a particular set of political state and business-led agendas that essentially further entrench widespread dependence on debt.

Keywords:

• Financial infrastructures
• platform lending
• financial inclusion
• platform capitalism
• alternative finance

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention 2017 and at the workshop ‘The Changing Technological Infrastructures of Global Finance’ at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in May 2017. In addition to participants at both events, I would like to thank Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn and Nick Bernards for their help as special issue editors in developing the article, as well as the anonymous journal reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship under Grant ECF-2014-241

Notes on contributors

Chris Clarke

Chris Clarke is Associate Professor in Political Economy at the University of Warwick. He is author of Ethics and Economic Governance: Using Adam Smith to Understand the Global Financial Crisis, as well as recent articles in Theory, Culture & Society.