Financial Personality and the Politics of ‘Promising'

Recently, financial service providers have taken a renewed interest in the subjectivity of the ordinary consumer. Rather than addressing debtor subjectivity through credit evaluation mechanisms focusing on ‘character’, which has traditionally been defined as a tangible behavioral classification (Fourcade & Healy 2013), today, it is increasingly also being addressed in terms of ‘financial personality’ in order to govern more intangible, moral aspects of consumer self-governance.

Applying discourse analysis, in this paper I will investigate how a range of corporate technologies have been devised to help consumers identify their financial habits, anxieties, and decision-making patters summed up in a personality type. Such tests normally take the form of on-line surveys eventually presenting the user with a pre-determined personality (type); a short description of such a personality; and some ‘good advice’ on the management of personal finance given this particular personality. Their pseudo-scientific aura suggests that the information generated is not valuable for the financial organization as such but is primarily supposed to fold back unto the individual itself. While such tests can easily be viewed – and dismissed – as simple marketing tools, the paper will argue that they can be read to represent valuation devices, i.e. particular technologies that allow individuals to assign (financial) value to their personality and, as a consequence, engender particular financial subjectivities.

What might account for financial organizations’ interest in offering consumers to get to ‘know’ their financial personality? The paper will argue that financial personality tests reflect an “engineering of the soul” (Rose 1989) toward a financial subjectivity that is at once disposed to the morality of the promise (to honor one’s debt) and the guilt (of having entered into it) (Lazzarato 2012). According to Lazzarato capitalism must train individuals to “promise”, to install in them guilt and responsibility as effects of the power of debt on subjectivity, effectively establishing equivalence between current and future behavior through the calculation of debt obligations. In so doing capitalism exercises a control of the future and its potentialities by reducing it to current power relations. As such, the technologies also represent a conduct of conduct (Foucault 2007) aimed at “enhancing” financial costumers’ self-governance in a situation where financial organizations are faced with increasing incalculability of risk following the rise in private investment and household debt.

What is characteristic about these technologies is then not that they are linked directly to credit evaluation, but that they, at least partly, present themselves as an element in an educational project aimed at financial inclusion by empowering consumers through raised levels of financial literacy. Gaining self-awareness of one’s financial personality promises an emancipation of the subject; giving the subject control of his/her life, which was hitherto managed by ignorance and entrenched patterns of undesirable financial behavior. In this sense, financial organizations’ concerns regarding the financial personality of consumers can be seen as an integral part of how financialization of the everyday (Martin 2002) and the domesticizing of financial economies is a means for the contemporary acquisition of self and the self-managed life. Meanwhile, from the perspective of the financial organizations, engaging in personal finance education carries with it the prospects of reduced risk-taking, the logic being that financially self-aware and literate consumers will make better financial decisions and hence better support the reproduction of the financial system. The paper will assume that the technologies for identifying financial personality can be read as an instance of a discreet regulatory ambition, since, as Maasen and Sutter put it, “all practices concerned with (self-) education, (…) can be regarded as pivotal governmental techniques in that they perfectly coalesce technologies of domination (e.g., the wish to educate) and technologies of self (e.g., the wish to become educated)” (2007, p. 9).

So far, financial literacy initiatives have predominantly been based on a biopolitical empowerment of targeted, high risk financial consumer populations (e.g. school children (at different age groups), the unbanked, the unemployed, retirees etc) from the outside, using instructional didactics building cognitive and conceptual understanding. To address the financial ignorance (Højbjerg 2016 forthcoming) of such high risks segments the strategies of empowerment are based on a totalizing subjectivity. By contrast, drawing on behavioral economics’ notions of individuals’ inherent or internalized psychological biases, the emerging pedagogical strategies based on the concept of financial personality take as a starting point from within the perceived actual financial behavior of the individual to allow that individual identify its attitudes, habits, anxieties, and desires regarding money. To know one self’s financial personality is assumed to protect oneself against oneself and to work on the self is assumed to help appropriate those aspects of one’s unique personality that are beneficial for (self-)rational and self-optimizing financial behavior.

This emerging, individualizing, strategy carries with it the potential to ‘get closer’ to the consumer with inspiration from the psychographic techniques developed as marketing tools in the 1970ies (Knights and Sturdy 1997). However, the financial organizations’ interest in such strategies can be viewed as complementary to parallel emerging efforts of getting to ‘know’ consumers’ behavior and preferences through the use of big data, which seems to render more traditional forms of credit evaluation less relevant. Under the credo of “all data is credit data!” (Hardy 2012), financial organizations seeking to establish the creditworthiness of potential costumers might get to ‘know’ more about the financially relevant aspects of the individual than the individual itself. Hence, the focus on promissory self-technologies aimed at subjectifying consumers into pledging their future work and lifestyle as both tangible (in terms of debt obligations) and intangible (in terms of the morality of guilt) collateral to creditors.

The paper will conclude by discussing whether the financial governmentalization of subjectivity as a pedagogical strategy of self-governance is not at best precarious and open to counter-conduct (Deville 2016), since it is based on an inclusion of non-financial aspects of consumers’ subjectivity into their financial personality, in effect rendering everything relevant for the individual’s financial behavior.