Transforming Financial Practices and Infrastructures: Examining Trust and Social Exclusion in Digital Payments

Digitalization has transformed public infrastructures into privately-driven services and platforms. With it changed even practices tied to it, amongst others are financial practices: The way we pay, spend, and save is constantly challenged by new technologies. With the rise of fintechs and their data-driven business models, the financial sector has changed considerably. Besides publicly-mandated and trusted institutions, tech firms are constantly introducing new products and promises about the future of everyday.

Likewise, this has also affected the financial practices of consumers. One goal is to transform financial practices into convenient experiences embedded in digital products. It is no longer about what money is, but what it does. For consumers, digital financial services promise new ways to distinguish money into monies, and thus also earmark the intimate and social relations attached to it.

Payments work through network effects, and only do so, if shared belief and trust is established as all money derives its value from trust. How to create trust in money, as in digital financial infrastructure, that is increasingly carried by private actors?

I will present empirical data from Sweden, where paying and handling finances digitally is widely adopted. Cash is rarely used and barely seen. Likewise, everyday life without access to digital financial infrastructure has become increasingly cumbersome. New forms of social exclusion, understood as a lack of trust, have formed. In the complex entanglement of public and private actors, responsibilities for the digitally and financially excluded are yet to be found.

Based on empirical material from 39 in-depth interviews with consumers and experts as well as ethnographic fieldwork, I present different mechanisms of social exclusion. Some may lack digital skills, others are excluded by the set-up and logic of the digital financial infrastructure, and some simply refuse to be part of a digitally and financially included society.