Narratives of Fintech: The Political Economy of Disruptive Discourse

The proliferation of new financial technologies (Fintech) has sparked intense debates about their economic implications and their potential to disrupt existing political, regulatory, even and geopolitical structures. In policy discourse, the Fintech challenge is often framed as a tension between fostering innovation, promoting financial inclusion, and safeguarding financial stability. This paper examines how central banks, and monetary authorities articulate and address these tensions in speeches on Fintech collected through the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Drawing on a corpus of 675 Fintech-related speeches, I apply zero-shot classification using a BERT-based model, with theory-driven thematic labels. The resulting label distributions serve as dependent variables in a series of cross-sectional OLS models, aggregated at the country level. Explanatory variables capture macroeconomic conditions, infrastructural development, and institutional characteristics. The findings show systematic variation in thematic emphasis across income groups and institutional contexts, suggesting that Fintech policy narratives are influenced by political-economy factors. I find that countries at opposite levels of the financial development spectrum differ in their framing of Fintech as a positive or negative source of disruption.