Online Composition Project: Perception of Fintech on social media
“Fintech won’t challenge us”- CEO of Barclays
Fintech, a broadly used term in the financial services industry, can be used in a array of contexts. For the purpose of this composition, the assumption is that fintech is the leveraging of technology to allow efficient financial processes. Typically, startups or established companies leverage this concept to create innovative financial tools, to better service their clients. The notion that fintech will replace traditional banking practises has been iterated on several social media and online platforms. However, what are the various implications of this disruption in this industry? How is it being perceived by individuals online? In this composition I will highlight the different definitions and perceptions of fintech on social media and what is the ‘correct’ interpretation of fintech.
The lack of information exchange and conversation on social media platforms made it difficult to understand the finance discourse community’s views and perspectives on the innovations in fintech. Since this topic is broad and relatively new, typical discussion platforms such as Twitter and Reddit have minimal conversations circulating on their platforms. Due to this, writers over exaggerate the the title to catch people’s attentions. For instance in the article below, “Blockchain is Meaningless”, the title intrinsically conveys an argument, however in the article, the author spends time explaining what blockchain is and how the word is misused.
Although, the article discusses varying definitions and applications of Blockchain, in the comments section, people are building upon the various definitions and stating their opinions regarding the topic.The user ‘pixelated_soul’ attempts to introduce the notion of private distributed ledger, thereby extending the conversation from the article.This lengthy comment, like many conversations in this community, serves to exemplify the density of discussions and values exchange people have online. It can be inferred that the community is still trying to understand the different applications of blockchain, and although it is established perhaps there is still room for development.
In addition, the user ‘jontseng’ relays their interest in AI and Big Data, which goes to show that discussions of blockchain are interchangeable with AI and big data; it shows the growing interest and curiosity in fintech.
On “The Economist”s website, they upload articles and have a separate forum for comment from users (with accounts). This forum allows for discussion and debate on the topic of the article, and thereby, enabling knowledge production. Most platforms have comment sections right below the content, whereas The Economist as a separate site where you have to register to comment. This specific article “The fintech revolution” serves to highlight how fintech will improve the financial services industry in 3 disruptive ways, in terms of cost, quality and stability.
However, the commentators have differing view points. Some individuals agree and some strongly disagree. It’s difficult to ensure credibility or reliability with these comments, as there is no way to find out who is commenting. Additionally, all the comments are only responses to the article. And users are not able to comment or reply to each other, therefore the conversation is rather one sided. This hinders the ability for the community to debate and come to a consensus, and therefore knowledge production is limited.
On the other hand, the majority of the comments and conversations on The Economist are quite lengthy and thought out, however, the tone isn’t entirely professional. Some users specifically quote from the article and analyse each section as part of their response. Additionally, the user ‘quantitative hazing’ delves into policies and regulation in their comment, expanding on the knowledge from the article.
The Economist has comments that are more relevant towards the article and the topic at hand, additionally users typically belong to a discourse community. However, Reddit is a platform where the topics of conversation are variable. People introduce new insights and view points, and sometimes it can be off tangent from where the discussion stemmed from.
From the comments you can see the users are not from the finance community. Making references such as “gold sach” and when they are actually referring to Goldman Sachs, and thinking fintech “was about fish” implies their lack of interest in this field, and their nonchalant display of opinions. It is clear not much thought went into their comments, and individuals freely post honest thoughts. Additionally, unlike The Economist, where you seek more filtered and specific content, on reddit people mostly stumble upon posts or scroll through subreddits.
YouTube is another medium with a widespread audience. I watched a Tedx talk on How How FinTech is Shaping the Future of Banking and this talk was perhaps the most comprehensive in terms of explaining the future of the financial services industry and how bankers need to evolve with this change to not be replaced. Ted Talks are typically given by individuals with expertise in their specialised fields, and therefore, there is a sense of credibility to the content that Ted delivers. Additionally, this platform is symbolic of the discourse community, where knowledge exchange and research sharing occurs. In terms of YouTube’s efficacy, as a medium, to generate conversation around this topic is limited. The comments are rather arbitrage from the actual video and mainly personal.
Here, users are displaying disdain towards the banking and financial industry in general. This is another example of how people misinterpret Fintech. The user ‘guidance to all’ gives his/her’s perspective on fintech and commenting that “richies” will keep all the “actual money”. There is a difference in language and eloquence in the type of conversations that occur on YouTube as oppose to The Economist or The Conversation (below). Similar to Reddit, these users are acting like experts and commenting based on subjectivity and not factual information.
The Conversation is a media outlet that allows authors to post academic articles, and these articles are freely available online. Unlike The Economist or the Wall Street Journal where you need to subscribe most times, The Conversation is a platform that addresses diverse academic topics. Ranging from Art, Religion and Ethics to Medicine, Health and Politics. This Australian website enables debate and commentary on various issues and topics. Essentially, a article is posted and when you scroll down to the bottom, the site allows the user to post comments after signing in.
To comment, the user can sign in through any social media account, whether it is Twitter, Facebook or Google. From the screenshot of the comments, we can see that one of the users is a CEO/Founder and another an executive director at the Australian Centre for Financial Studies. This exemplifies the user base here and how different it is to other platforms such as YouTube or Reddit. The language here is more formal, and Amy even acknowledges the opinion of another commenter. Although the purpose of this outlet is to enable discussion and dialogue, the “comment removed by moderator” implies censorship, limiting the drive in conversation. The comment could have been removed for various reasons, perhaps for the use of foul language or the irrelevancy of the comment. However, on most public outlets the level of moderation on comments is very minimal. The comments in this platform also branched out into different topics of fintech, such as P2P lending (peer-to-peer), which seems to be a trend on most conversations that occur in this topic.
Facebook is another social media site where users are able to exchange knowledge and information through posts. Below is a CNBC news post, where they posted a video about “what is Fintech”. They typically have a “What is …” feature, where they discuss and define relevant news topics “without the jargon”. In this video CNBC discusses the rise of Fintech and various innovations globally.
This video had 23 comments on Facebook and 880 shares. In comparison to CNBC’s average views and shares which is over a few hundred thousand, the traction this video has gained is significantly lower. There could be several reasons for this, whether it is that the lack of interest people have in fintech, or perhaps the don’t know much about it to be curious. Additionally, in the comments people are mostly tagging each other, and there isn’t much interpretation of the video.
To conclude, it seems that the drive in conversation is dependent on the social media outlet. Where users differ and therefore the conversations differ. However, a common trend I noticed was that most ‘fintech’ labelled articles have various derivative conversations that occur from it, and therefore people have different perceptions of what fintech is. Since innovation is continuously evolving in this industry at times it’s hard to keep up if one is not part of the community, as illustrated above.