IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/rripxx/v26y2019i5p863-885.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Platform lending and the politics of financial infrastructures

Author

Listed:
  • Chris Clarke

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Chris Clarke, 2019. "Platform lending and the politics of financial infrastructures," Review of International Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 26(5), pages 863-885, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:rripxx:v:26:y:2019:i:5:p:863-885
    DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2019.1616598
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09692290.2019.1616598
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/09692290.2019.1616598?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gordon Kuo Siong Tan, 2021. "Democratizing finance with Robinhood: Financial infrastructure, interface design and platform capitalism," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 53(8), pages 1862-1878, November.
    2. Sánchez, Marisa A., 2022. "A multi-level perspective on financial technology transitions," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 181(C).
    3. Nadia Nahar Purkayastha & Şule Erdem Tuzlukaya, 2020. "Determination Of The Benefits And Risks Of Peer-To-Peer (P2p) Lending: A Social Network Teory Approach," Copernican Journal of Finance & Accounting, Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika, vol. 9(3), pages 131-143.
    4. Angela Tritto & Yujia He & Victoria Amanda Junaedi, 2020. "Governing the gold rush into emerging markets: a case study of Indonesia’s regulatory responses to the expansion of Chinese-backed online P2P lending," Financial Innovation, Springer;Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, vol. 6(1), pages 1-24, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:rripxx:v:26:y:2019:i:5:p:863-885. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/rrip20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.