Money is data – the platformization of financial transactions

Abstract

Financial transactions are part of everyday life, yet banking has largely withstood the digital transformation within most European countries. Recently, there have been initiatives that merge the digital and the financial sphere by integrating the transactions that run through established financial infrastructures into digital platforms. Large data-driven companies hereby seek access to financial transactions and try to embed payments within their platforms. This contribution discusses differing models of how tech-driven companies gain access to financial infrastructures, and how recently introduced policies engender these processes. Within Europe and the United Kingdom, banks that operate through financial infrastructures and hold most transactional data are now required by regulators to provide access to their customers' accounts. The platformization of financial transactions is thus not purely a technical question, but it also is a remarkable example of how politically enforced changes in the materiality of data lead to reconfigurations with broader economic and social consequences. It results in the transformation of money into a form of (transactional) data and shows how the value of money and data depends on the technological underpinnings that determine the capability of their circulation. In order to understand their valuation, we need to take the material assemblages that enable their distribution into account.

Self-sovereign identity

“…Health identities start to appear as immunity passports. Financial identity escapes financial institutions and generates value in fintech (Westermeier, 2020). Situated within broader digital identity development discussions 2 (United Nations, 2015), control over identity becomes instrumental as individuals, state, and private actors compete for power over its physical and digital expressions.…”

From audiences to data points: The role of media agencies in the platformization of the news media industry

“…The relatively new theoretical perspective of platformization is promising in relation to researching and understanding the role of digital platforms in shaping the public sphere. Platformization has been applied in various areas of business studies (Nieborg and Poell, 2018) but is also used in other fields such a healthcare (Bygstad and Hanseth, 2019; Charitsis, 2019) and the financial sector (Westermeier, 2020), and can be defined as ‘the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web and its consequences’ (Helmond, 2015: 1) or as ‘the penetration of economic, governmental, and infrastructural extensions of digital platforms into the web and app ecosystems, fundamentally affecting the operations of the cultural industries’ (Nieborg and Poell, 2018: 4275). Whether speaking of a ‘rise’ or a ‘penetration’ and whether including an explicit governmental aspect or not, both definitions point to platformization as a process where platforms become the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the web, bringing with it fundamental changes – also for the cultural industries and thus the news media industry.…”

Finance/security infrastructures

“…Though now relegated to broadly separate disciplinary domains, it is difficult to disentangle historically the violent practices of imperial statebuilding from political economy (and vice versa). The profound historical relations between financial practices and security politics is now subject of a growing literature that explores the finance/ security nexus (for example Boy et al, 2017;Gilbert, 2015;Tellmann, 2018;Westermeier, 2020).…”