The state-led platformisation of financial services: Frictionless ecosystems and an expansive logic of “smartness” in Singapore

Abstract

This article explores the role of the state in driving the platformisation of industry, and in doing so offers a counterpoint to scholarship that focusses on the exploitative effects of private sector-led platformisation. That scholarship views platformisation as the latest incarnation of neoliberal urbanism, with the profit-maximising tendencies of the private sector driving the proliferation of platforms throughout everyday life. Notwithstanding, there remains a need to consider alternative models of platformisation. Drawing on 31 interviews with architects of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative, we consider the state-led platformisation of financial services. We argue that state-led platformisation can open up marketplaces to new forms of innovation, customer value creation, and competition through the creation of data ecosystems that are built on openness, trust and transparency. This flattens the distinctions between regulator and regulated, and between competitor and collaborator, and foregrounds the role of platforms in driving the transformation of industry.