The Human Impact of Financial Innovation: Mobility, Choice, and Risk

Innovation in financial technology is often conceptualized as centering upon technological developments or novel applications of technology to undertake financial transactions. Yet the drivers of innovation often lie in the global mobility of people, organizations, ideas, skills, capital, and technology (Armano and Javarone, 2017). While mobility is increasingly in the reach of ordinary people, such as through migration, access to technology, or education, the ability to produce innovation or consume innovative products is unevenly distributed. Moreover, new products on the market are more likely to cause problems or risks to consumers as their potential impacts have not yet been fully tested. This is especially true of the new range of financial products, commonly known as “FinTech,” that are emerging in the consumer market. Today, there are far more financial services available to consumers, and they are provided by a wide range of companies, many of whom are not traditional financial service providers. The availability of financial services through the Internet, and their use on mobile devices, means that consumers can access a far wider and more specialized array of financial products from companies located around the world. This greater level of access and choice in financial products has the potential to deliver both positive and negative effects for consumers. On one hand, it can expand consumer choice, increase access to product information, assist with financial literacy, and decrease transaction costs. On the other hand, it may exacerbate certain social and economic issues, such as fraud, user errors, learning difficulties, ineffective UX, stress, and financial mismanagement. Within this context, “mobility” is a useful analytical tool to identify the different kinds of effects that emerge from financial innovation within different populations, and in different use-cases. In this chapter, I explore the relationship between innovation, mobility, and change, and how this relationship affects consumers. I discuss a range of issues that increased access to financial products presents for consumers, particularly in the areas of product mobility, human mobility, and information mobility. I draw upon the “mobilities turn” (Schiller and Salazar, 2013; Sheller and Urry, 2006), which has addressed the various ways, both positive and negative, in which the increased mobility of people, things, and information around the world affects people’s lives and social relationships. I end with a discussion of the challenges researchers face in keeping up-to-date with the social effects of financial transformation.