This paper aims to examine how Latin American fintech practitioners develop and conceptualize digital financial services in the pursuit of financial inclusion. It interrogates how fintech specialists attribute digital payments with the potential to reshape the financial conduct of target populations by facilitating the provision of credit, enabling the mission and the business of financial inclusion and the possibility of reconfiguring user habits through rewards and incentives.
This study follows a qualitative research design based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with fintech professionals and participant observation in Latin American fintech industry events between 2019 and 2022. The author prioritized these data collection strategies to approach a network of fintech specialists and examine the worldviews and conceptions they build into the design and implementation of digital financial services.
The provision of consumer credit and other financial products underpins both the mission of financial inclusion and the business model of fintech firms. These services are enabled by digital payment networks that generate transactional and behavioral user histories. As a result, fintech practitioners develop technologies that encourage users to transact, save, invest and borrow.
Due to their ethnographic origin, findings are neither representative nor generalizable.
The ways in which fintech seeks to reformulate the economic agency of users expose them to financial risk and overindebtedness; and revenues depend on the collection of fees and high interest rates. For this reason, policy should focus on transparency and education, so these charges and processes are properly understood by users.
To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the first qualitative studies to explore the expansion of Latin American digital financial services from the perspective of practitioners. It investigates the concepts and objectives that are built into fintech, like the generation of new financial habits. For this reason, this article contributes to understanding the role of technology in creating new forms of intermediation, credit and indebtedness.
