A feminist approach to fintech: exploring ‘buy now, pay later’ technologies and consumer fintech
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Buy now, pay later' (BNPL) is a financial technology that is reshaping online consumption by allowing users to split payment for goods over 3-4 interest-free digital installments.While the use and value of BNPL has risen dramatically, it, and other consumer-oriented fintech, has received relatively little critical attention.Demographically, the majority of BNPL users are young and women and its negative impacts are disproportionately felt by lower-income groups, making this a specifically gendered financial technology.In this paper we develop a feminist approach to studying fintech, which we use to present a critical analysis of BNPL drawing on data from the US, UK, and Canada.Through this lens, we explore BNPL's revenue streams, data collection practices, relative lack of regulation, and how these factors function structurally in the digital payments space, to analyze their impact for consumers and retailers in the context of rising consumer indebtedness and the financialization of consumption.We argue that BNPL is a fintech intervention that attempts to shift consumer practices with distinctly gendered implications for social reproduction, household finance, and everyday relations to debt and money.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it