Narratives of FinTech: a zero or positive sum game?
P13-S317-4
Presented by: Alfredo Hernandez Sanchez
The rise of FinTech has 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 an analytic framework of narratives of finance by leveraging computationally assisted text analysis and qualitative content analysis across two corpora, each consisting of English-language texts on FinTech collected automatically from various online sources. The first consists of statements, speeches and press-statements from country representatives in finance-related international institutions and forums such as the International Monetary Fund, the G-20, and the BRICS+ summits. The second consists of a global sample of news articles with fintech-related keywords from English-language news sources. The central hypothesis 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 analysis is performed in two stages. The first tests whether unsupervised machine learning algorithms (e.g. structural topic models) can uncover coherent 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. In the second stage, a small sample of representative documents from both corpora is selected and subjected to in-depth qualitative content analysis. Initial results show that is positive-sum views conceptually emphasize terms that highlight individual agency whereas zero-sum views emphasize structural constraints.
Keywords: fintech, automated text analysis, mixed methods