FinTech platform regulation: Regulating with/against platforms in the United Kingdom and China

This paper develops case studies of the United Kingdom (UK) and China to analyse divergent national financial regulatory approaches to FinTech as a novel political economy of platforms. Regulating with platforms is core to the approach taken in the UK, where start-up and early-career platforms are enrolled into an innovation-friendly financial regulation regime that promotes consumption and competition balanced with stability. In China, meanwhile, measures are being instituted to enhance rules and restrictions imposed on FinTech platforms. BigTech-led FinTech expansion was encouraged to expedite financial reforms to fuel economic growth and ensure authoritarian state control, but regulation is now shown to be working against the furtherance of platform power

Capitalising on the crowd: the monetary and financial ecologies of crowdfunding

‘Crowdfunding’ is a method of raising money and finance to capitalise projects of various kinds. Drawing on the networking capabilities of the internet and software platforms, those seeking project funding appeal to potentially diverse audiences who are collectively referred to as ‘the crowd’. What practitioners, advocates and policymakers typically identify within crowdfunding is its ‘alternative’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘democratising’ qualities; that is, it is held to be a novel, digitally-rendered economic space which has the capacity to challenge established funding practices in banking, capital markets and venture capital networks, offering a more open and egalitarian source of capital for economic, social and cultural entrepreneurship. The paper develops the concept of ‘ecologies’, drawn from the geographies of money and finance literature, to advance a critical understanding of the crowdfunding economy that is sceptical of its apparent qualities. First, the concept of ecologies encourages the analysis of diverse and proliferative monetary and financial forms, enabling an understanding that avoids the binary opposition of ‘capitalist/alternative’ economic forms and which differentiates between the variegated crowdfunding ecologies that have emerged to date. Second, by foregrounding the intermediation processes and credit-debt relations of monetary and financial ecologies, it is argued that crowdfunding may largely replicate rather than disrupt the extant institutional and debt dynamics of funding practices. Third, by emphasizing the socio-spatial effects of monetary and financial ecologies, attention is drawn to the need for further research into the unevenness that mitigates against crowdfunding being as open and egalitarian as its advocates claim

Platform capitalism: the intermediation and capitalization of digital economic circulation

A new form of digital economic circulation has emerged, wherein ideas, knowledge, labour and use rights for otherwise idle assets move between geographically distributed but connected and interactive online communities. Such circulation is apparent across a number of digital economic ecologies, including social media, online marketplaces, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and other manifestations of the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Prevailing accounts deploy concepts such as ‘co-production’, ‘prosumption’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ to explain digital economic circulation as networked exchange relations characterised by their disintermediated, collaborative and democratizing qualities. Building from the neologism of platform capitalism, we place ‘the platform’ – understood as a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of capitalization – at the centre of the critical analysis of digital economic circulation. To create multi-sided markets and coordinate network effects, platforms enrol users through a participatory economic culture and mobilize code and data analytics to compose immanent infrastructures. Platform intermediation is also nested in the ex-post construction of a replicable business model. Prioritizing rapid up-scaling and extracting revenues from circulations and associated data trails, the model performs the structure of venture capital investment which capitalizes on the potential of platforms to realize monopoly rents

Playful finance: Gamification and intermediation in FinTech economies

This paper examines how digital gamification techniques, which incorporate video gaming elements (rather than full-fledged games) into apps, are reshaping the logics and practices of intermediation that are core to FinTech economies. First, we argue gamification brings into view socio-technical knowledges, such as behavioral science, digital marketing, and user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design, which are increasingly important to constituting FinTech intermediation. Second, gamification features specialist firms that are presently overlooked by research into the roles of changing advanced producer services (APS) complexes in FinTech and financial intermediation. Third, gamified apps are deployed to advance competitive intermediary positions which playfully capture user attention and configure user behavior, contrasting with FinTech strategies that typically promise users’ ease of access, reduced transaction costs and personalized products and services. We illustrate these arguments through three firm-level case studies from across Asia, where the development of gamified FinTech apps has been especially prominent

Substrate-Integrated Folded Waveguide Slot Antenna

In recent years a number of researchers have proposed novel techniques for fabricating rectangular waveguide using microwave integrated circuit techniques. These so-called substrate integrated guides have been fabricated using multilayer LTCC, multi- and single-layer microwave laminates and photoimageable thick films. All of these structures result in dielectric filled rectangular waveguide and as such have a width reduction of 1/square root of the relative permittivity over conventional waveguide. Furthermore, by their very nature they are easily integrated with planar transmission lines and circuits, allowing hybrid waveguide/microstrip systems to be fabricated on a single substrate. Several researchers have investigated slot antennas and arrays in substrate-integrated guide. In this paper we show a slot antenna in a folded substrate-integrated waveguide. These waveguides have half the width of the other types of substrate-integrated waveguide. As such the present structure allows arrays of slot antennas to be more highly integrated

Outcomes, Registries and Medical Marijuana: Towards Establishing Dispensary Monitoring and Reporting Standards

The acceptance by a large number of state governments of medical marijuana dispensaries and the regulatory framework to support their licensing has put to one side the issue of monitoring and reporting outcomes. This is a major oversight. It is an untenable situation given the limited evidence base for the clinical benefits and risks associated with dispensed botanical marijuana. The purpose of this commentary is to propose that, as a condition of licensing, marijuana dispensaries should be required to establish a registry to support ongoing monitoring of patient response associated with botanical cannabis formulations. Patients should be monitored over the course of their treatment to assess, in the case of severe non-cancer pain as an example, pain intensity and functional status by pain location. The dispensary, in meeting required audit standards, should be in a position to report on patient response over baseline to the provider who has recommended botanical cannabis. As well, registries should be in a position to report to state licensing agencies response to therapy by target patient groups. Establishing site-specific registries should go some way to meeting the present evidence deficit for botanical marijuana, reducing barriers to its acceptance by providers, patients and health agencies.   Article Type: Commentar

Establishing Credibility for Medical Marijuana: The Proposed Prometheus Dispensary Registry for Botanical Cannabis

A previous commentary in INNOVATIONS in Pharmacy argued that, given the lack of evidence for outcomes in medical marijuana, outside of a handful of randomized clinical trials and even fewer observational studies, good clinical practice points to the need for monitoring patients who received cannabis through certified medical marijuana dispensaries. The commentary noted the lack of standards for monitoring cannabis patients and the lack of feedback from the dispensary to providers. Botanical cannabis administration was occurring in, effectively, an evidence vacuum. More to the point, dispensary owners and investors seem uninterested in establishing a robust evidence base for cannabis outcomes.  Given the range of conditions and symptoms presented by patients, to include the prevalence of multiple symptoms together with the range of potential cannabis formulations, dosing regimens and delivery options, a failure to monitor patients over the course of their exposure to cannabis in not acceptable. The purpose of this commentary is to report on a proposed on-line registry structure proposed by Prometheus Research for medical marijuana dispensaries in the US. The registry tracks and reports on patients over the course of treatment with botanical cannabis with the focus on severe or chronic non-cancer pain, severe nausea, persistent muscle spasms and seizures, together with prevalent comorbidities – fatigue, anxiety, depression and sleep. This is the first time a registry has been developed for dispensaries in the United States as a model for a robust evidence base to support botanical cannabis as a therapy option.   Article Type: Commentar

CVS Health and the Imaginary Worlds of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER)

In August 2018, CVS Health released a position paper detailing policies in place and those being implemented to help reduce the costs of drugs. This paper introduced three new strategies for reducing costs. These are (i) zero out of pocket costs for chronic disease through a preventive drug list; (ii) reducing the launch price through adoption of modeled cost-per-QALY outcomes by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) to guide clients to exclude drugs launched at a price of greater than $100,000 per QALY; and (iii) introducing tools to be used by doctors, pharmacists and consumers to create greater transparency in understanding the real cost of drugs. The purpose of this commentary is to consider the second of these strategies, the application of a willingness to pay threshold as a viable strategy for impacting launch costs. The arguments presented here are that while modeled cost-per-QALY claims are a staple of formulary committee deliberations in many single payer health systems, their adoption by CVS Health fails to take into account not only the imaginary nature of the modeled construct utilized to generate the cost-per-QALY estimate and its shortcomings but the fact that alternative model structures may render invalid the application of willingness-to-pay thresholds. The case is made that CVS Health could adopt a more rigorous process of formulary assessment to support both preliminary assessments of new products and also an ongoing process of formulary review that challenge manufacturers to justify pricing over product patent life. This process should capitalize on the development of formulary evaluation platforms, potentially involving blockchain technology and smart contracting, for therapy interventions in targeted patient populations. Introducing a more rigorous formulary process, in particular the requirement for claims evaluation protocols, will not only assist CVS Health in restraining price increases over the life of the product but, for the first time in the US, put manufacturers on notice that patently unreasonable pricing policies and claims for product performance can be systematically and effectively challenged.   Article Type: Commentar

Information or Evidence? Abandoning Imaginary Worlds for Blockchains in Health Technology Assessment

Commentaries published in INNOVATIONS in Pharmacy over the past 2 years have made the case that, as a basis for formulary decision making, the construction of imaginary modeled worlds fails to meet the standards of normal science. As such, they should be rejected as a basis for decision-making. While their proponents argue that imaginary constructs are key sources of information for formulary decisions, the fact is that the claims made from those models are impossible to validate. Indeed, they were never intended to be validated. Claims for product performance should be presented in evidentiary terms. That is, they should be credible, evaluable and replicable. If the commitment to imaginary worlds in technology assessment is to be abandoned a key requirement is for platforms that allow claims to be assessed in real time and in a timeframe that is meaningful to decision makers. Recent developments in blockchain technology offer the prospects for platforms that meet criteria for claims assessment.   Article Type: Commentar

Establishing Practice Risk Management and Outcomes Claims for Medical Marijuana Dispensaries: Questions Legislators Should Ask

In a previous commentary in INNOVATIONS in Pharmacy, the case was made that a major oversight in approving the establishment of medical marijuana programs through commercially and not-for-profit operated dispensaries is the failure to put in place standards for the monitoring and reporting of outcomes. It was pointed out that the evidence base is limited for the range of dosing options, administrative routes and conditions treated. The concern is that the ease that patients have in obtaining medical marijuana certification in many states means that a medical marijuana program is, in effect, little different from a recreational program. Dispensaries understandably focus on sales and returns to investors with scant attention given to tracking and reporting outcomes across the range of conditions and symptoms presented.  While this no doubt appeals to investors in reducing administration costs, it makes it virtually impossible to deliver the appropriate and coordinated level of care that patients should expect if a medical marijuana dispensary is to meet it responsibilities in its duty of care. This places dispensaries at malpractice risk. Given this, this commentary focuses on the questions that legislators should ask in licensing medical marijuana dispensaries to ensure they meet a defensible duty of care to their patients.   Article Type: Commentar