Fintech Feminists

CHAPTER ONEWHAT THE FINTECH?

On 15 February 1999, Time magazine featured Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan alongside former Treasury Secretaries Larry Summers and Robert Rubin on the cover. Big, bold yellow letters proclaimed that the trio were on the committee to save the world from a global economic meltdown.¹ However, the cover also suggested that the group only prevented a global crisis for now.

That cover foreshadowed the inevitable – the 2008 global financial crisis hit less than a decade later. The collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008 marked the ominous dawn of this era of uncertainty, sending shockwaves rippling through the global financial bedrock.² Greenspan eventually conceded that the global financial crisis exposed a mistake in the free market ideology – trusting that free markets could regulate themselves – which guided his 18-year stewardship of US monetary policy.³

Fast forward to 24 May 2010, and this Time magazine featured a cover with three female regulators: United States Senator Elizabeth Warren, 19th Chair of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Sheila Bair, and 29th Chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission Mary Schapiro. They were dubbed “the women charged with cleaning up the mess,” portrayed with serious expressions – tasked with addressing the aftermath of unchecked corporate greed and the systemic failure of the banking system.⁴

I first noticed the juxtaposition between these two covers while ...