READING FINANCIAL SERVICES - TEXTS, CONSUMERS, AND FINANCIAL LITERACY

The authors focus upon the changing nature of production and consumpti on within the retail financial services industry. The perennial proble m which faces all producers of financial services is information asymm etry; that is, providers and consumers of financial products have uneq ual amounts of information about whether or not customers have the whe rewithal to make them 'capable' purchasers. Thus, the problem of infor mation asymmetry is usually manifested in a priori decisionmaking abou t the suitability of customers. This problem has traditionally been ov ercome by forging interpersonal relationships of trust with consumers through copresence. Increasingly, however, trust in consumers is being forged through technologically mediated means of information collecti on functioning 'at a distance' so that financial services producers ar e coming to 'read' consumers as 'texts' through the medium of database s. These developments have had a number of effects, such as increased competition in retail financial markets, while branch networks, which acted as durable barriers to entry to the market, have become less imp ortant as sites of market intelligence and knowledge. Consumers have a lso been forced to forge new relations of trust with retail financial service providers. This is increasingly being achieved through the use of various media and through identification with brands. Such develop ments have served to create social and spatial divisions of financial inclusion and exclusion, as producers use at-a-distance information to discriminate between 'good' and 'bad' customers. Those 'inside' the f inancial system are able to use their financial knowledge to take adva ntage of increased levels of competition between financial service pro viders. However, those excluded from the financial system are doubly h andicapped as they live in both a financial and an information shadow. Such individuals are likely to pay an increasingly heavy price for th eir exclusion, particularly given the collapse of universal welfare pr ovision and the allied growth of private welfare-related financial pro ducts. In recognition of this, in the final part of the paper we consi der ways of countering problems of financial exclusion and low levels of financial literacy.