Fintech’s Transparency–Publicity Nexus: Value Cocreation Through Transparency Discourses in Business-to-Business Digital Marketing

Abstract

This article engages with the critical study of contemporary publicity by examining transparency as a strategic project to platformize financial services. The article contributes to understandings of transparency as value cocreation in business-to-business markets. Through field-level discourse analysis, the article shows that transparency is contingent primarily on the nature of the market, in this case, a platformized industry, which valorizes transparency as part of a regime of data sharing and open access. Transparency is further contingent on the market actor: actors with lesser status and market legitimacy are more likely to seek to cocreate transparency with market actors of greater or similar status and legitimacy. The article concludes that in commercial spaces, publicity’s relationship to transparency is not only determined by market logic, but that all market logics are being drawn further toward a technological definition of transparency as “shareveillance,” as more segments of economic life become platformized.