TRUST ISSUES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: SOCIAL IMAGINARIES, RISK, AND USER LABOUR IN DIGITAL BANKING APPS

Resumen

This paper draws upon conceptual frameworks of platformisation (van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal, 2018), media convergence (Jensen, 2022), trust in digital banking (Mezei and Verteș-Olteanu, 2020; van Esterik-Plasmeijer and van Raaij, 2017), and social imaginaries (James, 2019; Mansell, 2012; Gillespie, 2018). It views digital banking apps as platforms that enable personalised interactions (Poell, Nieborg, and van Dijck, 2019), and aim to investigate the datafication (van Dijck, 2014; Sadowski, 2019) and platformisation of banking. This approach underscores the transformation of service dynamics and the challenges brought by digital banking concerning public accessibility and social inclusion (Swartz, 2020). We ask: a) What are the dominant imaginaries of payment reflected by contemporary financial services? and b) How do the design and affordances of digital payment services impact trust, responsibility, and user labour? This paper employs a modified walkthrough method (Light, Burgess, and Duguay, 2018) including detailed content analysis of the Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) documents required for initial access to seven digital banking apps in Ireland. The sampled banking apps include Bank of Ireland (BOI), N26, An Post Money, Revolut IE, Chase UK, Starling Bank UK, and Klarna. The modified walkthroughs highlight a significant convergence between the finance and media industries. Our analysis identified three dominant social imaginaries of payment leading to different designs for digital banking apps: a) the Institutional Imaginary, b) the Transactional Imaginary, and c) the Digital Imaginary.