The ‘fintech revolution’ is here! The disruptive impact of fintech on retail financial practices

Fintech is celebrated for its disruptive and democratizing qualities that dis/reintermediates the finance value chain. Claims of a ‘fintech revolution’ assume that fintech is ‘disruptive’ because of its innovative capabilities, but the extent to which these disruptive forces have reconfigured consumer financial knowledge and practices is not well understood. Using a questionnaire to survey retail consumers in Singapore on their use of fintech in performing different financial tasks, this article critically examines these claims of disruption and democratization by grounding them in the financial behaviors of consumers as informed by a financial ecologies approach. The results show a limited impact of fintech in shaping consumer financial behaviors. Respondents use fintech mainly for basic transactional purposes like making mobile payments and account management, but not so much for more complex matters like savings, investing and credit. The findings also reveal a ‘stickiness’ in financial behaviors that emphasizes the high touch points of human interaction. This study illustrates fintech’s variegated material outcomes by highlighting the unevenness in consumption of digital financial services and the enduring importance of human relationality in financial decision making

Becoming more connected to the financial human capitalnetwork may hold the key to improving wage inequality withinthe US finance industry

In an era of stagnant wages for the middle-classes, the financial services industry continues to be very well remunerated, especially in large cities. But to what extent does city-size drive wage inequalities? In new research that tracks the movement of over 20,000 skilled financial workers across 264 US cities between 2007 and 2011, Kuo Siong (Gordon) Tan constructs a financial human capital network. He finds that the network contains 40 financial hubs, which are linked to higher wages. He writes that rather than being a direct function of city size, wage inequality may be more pronounced between cities that are highly networked and those that are not