Narratives of FinTech: The Political Economy of Disruptive Discourse

In policy discourse, financial technology (FinTech) is commonly framed as a challenge between fostering innovation and safeguarding financial stability. This article examines how monetary authorities in the Global North and Global South construct this balance in their public discourse. Using a corpus of speeches collected from the Bank for International Settlements, I identify seven core themes through qualitative analysis and classify sentences across the full corpus using zero-shot classification. Contrary to expectations of ideational contestation, the analysis reveals a high degree of thematic homogeneity across regulators, suggesting the presence of a shared policy narrative that endorses a circumscribed and managed form of financial disruption. At the same time, regulators emphasise certain themes within this narrative in ways that reflect the political, economic, and institutional characteristics of the countries they represent. These patterns of variation are examined using descriptive statistics and cross-sectional regression models applied to the classified text data.