[17-meetings] Rebooting Amsterdam for the age of Big Tech: Platform capitalism, reintermediation, and financial-center change

[Vesna Manojlovic]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718523002208

Rebooting Amsterdam for the age of Big Tech: Platform capitalism, 
reintermediation, and financial-center change

Reijer Hendrikse, David Bassens, Alex Rossiter
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Department of Geography, Cosmopolis: Centre 
for Urban Research,


Abstract

The platformization of finance and the financial inroads made by tech 
firms large and small raises questions about the extent to which 
financial centers and their incumbent inhabitants retain their positions 
as key intermediaries in financial(ized) intermediation. Focusing on 
cloud adoption and digital payments in post-2008 Amsterdam, we study how 
and to what extent financial platformization entails the ‘rebooting’ of 
the Amsterdam financial center, by investigating (i) the changing 
composition and spatial structure of its inhabitants; (ii) the 
platformization of incumbent financial institutions and the rise of new 
intermediaries, and (iii) deepening interdependencies between financial 
institutions and Big Tech. We find that platform companies have come to 
inhabit both the city center and the Zuidas financial district at the 
expense of incumbent finance and other advanced producer services (APS). 
Along with the growing footprint of resident platform companies, 
typically relying on Big Tech cloud services, we identify growing 
interdependencies between finance and tech, as illustrated by the 
adoption of Big Tech cloud services among financial institutions old and 
new. To illuminate patterns of competition and collaboration between 
incumbent finance, Fintech and Big Tech, we foreground incumbent bank 
ING and Fintech Adyen, a payments services provider (PSP), and analyze 
their relations with tech giant Amazon. In the payments domain, we see 
new intermediaries like Adyen assume functions at the expense of 
incumbent APS intermediaries, including banks. In sum, we conclude that 
the rise of platform capitalism is progressively giving way to financial 
reintermediation and financial-center change, with tech companies 
forming an increasingly dominant sector within a 
platformizing/para/-financial APS complex, and with Big Tech assuming a 
growing yet uneven infrastructural role.


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