Technology is a great resource and a huge opportunity. However, being aware of this means having in mind that it must be handled with extreme care and great attention. It also means having knowledge of the history of mankind and how technological advancement has always produced a centralization of wealth and a consequent increase in inequality. For this reason, the technological one is a real challenge that we mustn't - but it wouldn't even be possible - to escape. On the contrary, we must accept it and grasp all the positive elements of advancement and progress purified of the most negative and dangerous effects for society. It's possible to do it? Yes, it is possible provided that the coordinates of morals and ethics are always kept in mind.
After all, the theme, despite what it appears to be, is by no means new. It was already clear to Pope Leo XIII when in 1891 with the encyclical which in fact opened the path of the Social Doctrine of the Church, he warned: "Rerum novarum semel excitata cupidine, quae diu quidem commovet civitates, illud erat consecuturum ut commutationum studi a rationibus politicis in oeconomicarum cognatum genus aliquando defluerent”. “The ardent desire for novelty which has long ago begun to agitate the peoples, naturally had to pass from the political order into the similar order of the social economy”.
Today that "burning desire for novelty" has moved from the field of production and the relationship between production and work to the field of communication and information and so, in the ranking of the richest and most influential people in the world, the first positions are all linked to the construction and management of IT system platforms with largely immaterial functioning. There are more and more activities which, in a disruptive way, replace traditional productive and commercial activities by distributing production and logistics all over the world with criteria which, if read with the canons of the past, are completely irrational but which are, instead, fully functional to the information circulation model, dismantling all certainties and creating new but certainly more backward and dangerous balances with a new international division of labour.
There are billions of people in the world who own at least one smartphone and with this they spend an ever-increasing part of their time exchanging – but in most cases unknowingly donating – information about themselves. Information is, today, a great wealth through which everything is managed and the market is created. The information asymmetry has taken on dimensions never experienced before. Millions of people work not only without being paid, but, even more seriously, without even being aware that they are creating value.
This framework must be kept in mind when, in the banking sector, we talk about fintech which is, and remains, an enormous opportunity for development and progress but always and only if it is framed in the material reality of the economy and in the ethical and moral dimension of work . Community banks rooted in the local area and which base their lending policy on a contact relationship model are in the best position to take up the challenge because they are able to adapt the digital context to the concrete reality which is made up of savers and investors, households and businesses. A concrete reality which, only through intermediation, maintains its conscious protagonism. From technological innovation the role of traditional credit intermediation that the banks linked to the territories have always played with optimal results is, Therefore, enhanced as an antidote to the dematerialization and depersonalization of the economy, in a context of ethical and moral rediscovery.
°°°The author is the Secretary General of the National Association of Popular Banks
