Platform lending and the politics of financial infrastructures

Online platform lending is typically understood as a challenge to incumbent banking institutions. Since its inception platform lending has been closely associated with particular financial and digital technological innovations that are thought to be changing how people engage in lending and borrowing around the world. In this article, I emphasize the deeply political aspect of these innovations. I claim that the platform lending model is built on the ostensible 'infrastructural quality' of credit providers across a number of national contexts. This helps explain why platform lending has emerged in its current form and why the firms involved tend to have a certain attachment to and association with the perceived merits of financial inclusion policy initiatives. The article further seeks to show that this infrastructural quality is politically contestable. When the politics of claims to infrastructure are taken seriously it is possible to demonstrate how platform lending, in spite of the 'alternative' and 'democratizing' discourses that surround the sector, is in fact built upon a particular set of political state and business-led agendas that essentially further entrench widespread dependence on debt.