Mellon Seminar: Rahul Mukherjee, English/Cinema & Media Studies, Penn

Fintech is marked by the confluence of digital and financial spheres, a phenomenon that has been taking place worldwide with tech-driven companies accessing data transactions within financial infrastructures and integrating them into their digital platforms. Fintech companies in India, like in several other emerging economies such as South Africa, tend to be venture capital backed startups. Some of the most cutting-edge developments in fintech, particularly in its mobile-first avatar, happened in Kenya with telecom company Safaricom’s mobile money platform M-Pesa, and since then in many countries, mobile telephony, data transactions, and digital lending have become entangled. With the establishment of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in 2016 and then the demonetization (notebandi) shocker by the Government of India in November of the same year, the movement and circulation of digital money in Indian society received a fillip. During the loan approval process, prior monetary transactions, social media activities, and consumer lifestyle purchases stored as tokens and records are scanned in search of alternative datapoints that guide decision-making. This is an example of how digital transactions continuously transform money into data and vice-versa. The delivery of loans by lending platforms might seem unmediated and direct, but through careful research, one will find myriad intermediaries such as third-party developers who provide APIs and SDKs as part of fintech infrastructure that drive automated decisions regarding authentication, verification, and loan disbursal. In this talk, I trace the distribution supply chains of payments and lending by mapping this fintech infrastructure.