'Bank Identity: Banks, ID Cards, and the Emergence of a Financial Identification Society in Sweden' by Orsi Husz in (2018) 19(2) Enterprise and Society comments
Today, nearly the entire adult population in Sweden uses a digital BankID for more purposes than only financial ones. Issuing identity documents is commonly perceived as a task for state authorities, but in Swedish society banks have played a dominant role as identificators. The first contribution of this article is that it explains this unique emergence of bank identity and traces the historical roots of a financial identification society to the mid-1960s. Banks started issuing standardized identity cards as a complement to the new system of paying salaries and wages by direct deposit to checking accounts, and these cards eventually became quasi-official identity documents. The Swedish story thus contrasts the scholarship on identification and state control. By treating identity as both a socio-cultural category and a materialization of a technology of control, I argue that the formalization of official identity documents for everyday use was intertwined with the creation of new financial identities. The introduction and general distribution of ID cards were parts of a process whereby wage earners became financial consumers, and the banks transformed themselves into retail companies. My second contribution therefore relates to the scholarly narrative on the financialization of everyday life since the 1980s. While the mass move to financial identification in Sweden, highlighted in this article, certainly fits the content of this narrative, it questions its chronology.Husz argues
When Swedes log in to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency’s website to request sickness or parental benefits, they have to use a so-called BankID, an electronic identity document issued by banks. How is it possible that the official proof of personal identity in basic civic issues is provided by a commercial bank? Today, seven million people, nearly the entire adult population in Sweden, have digital BankIDs. It is used not only for payments but also for online contact with public authorities such as the Tax Agency, the public healthcare system, and the municipal school system. Acting as parents or patients, why do people use identification granted in their capacity as bank consumers? The BankID was introduced in 2003 by a consortium of the largest banks, and it spread quickly. Electronic identification in Swedish society today is overwhelmingly dominated by the system offered by banks, and very few alternatives exist. It was only as late as 2011 that a governmental authority was created to supervise these systems.
Digital identification is a recent development, but the formalization of what could be called bank identity and the general use of official ID cards validated by banks have their roots back in the early 1960s. This was, as I will show in the article, a consequence of a new system of paying salaries and wages by direct deposit to checking accounts, introduced in the late 1950s and implemented on a large scale in the early 1960s. Workers, office clerks, shop assistants, and others became account holders at commercial banks and had to get used to paying by check, and thus to consuming banking services on a daily basis. The commercial banks—until then serving mainly the business and the very rich—also started selling a wide range of products to a broad public and marketing themselves as “department stores of finances.”3 At the same time, and as a result of this shift to retail banking, Swedish banks came to shoulder the responsibility of managing documented identities in society, which is usually associated with public authorities. Banks issued, validated, and distributed standardized ID cards to the general public.
The article describes, explains, and interprets this process in the twofold context of the history of identification, on the one hand, and the scholarship on the financialization of daily life, on the other. I ask how the validation of official individual identities came to be the specialty of banks in Swedish society, how this relates to conventional histories of identification, and what this says about a process described in recent literature as the creation of new financial subjects.
The article consists of three parts, followed by a conclusion. The first part deals with the above-mentioned research contexts and unpacks the relevance of my argument; the second part is concerned with the Swedish banks’ turn to a mass retailing of financial products and services; and the third and main part explores how this turn implied the banks’ engagement in the management of identification.
The study is based on archival and published sources from the banking sector, governmental and parliamentary committees, and the company AB ID-kort (ID Card Ltd.), established in 1968. While the official documents, as well as the material from banks and the Bankers’ Association helped me to track the institutional and legal changes and the creation of new financial and identificatory technologies, I also used general newspapers and house magazines from banks to access everyday practices and attitudes.
A Financial Identification Society
Commercial bodies and their role in identity management are absent from the historical literature on documented identity. Instead, this scholarship has been concerned almost exclusively with the activities of the state, as Edward Higgs points out in a recent essay.5 The history of identity documents is traced back to colonial and wartime administrations and crime control (for example, the use of fingerprints). John Torpey argues that the validation and production of legitimate identities, especially the passport (controlling people’s movement), have historically been a state monopoly. In his account on the history of the passport in the United States, Robertson connects the state’s predominance in documenting and controlling individual identities to a “documentary regime of verification,” which he claims emerged between the second half of the nineteenth century and the 1930s. According to him, and others, the modern technologies of identification based on new bureaucratic logics of objectivity and on an idea of a verifiable “official” and individual identity were developed and controlled by state authorities. It is only very recently, in a new digital regime, that Robertson detects “a move from the state as the primary vendor of the verification of individual identity.”
David Lyon, in his work on contemporary identification practices, also claims that the identity card is the manifestation of national governance by identification (and necessarily also by social sorting and exclusion). However, Lyon also points out the importance of corporate interests (for example, software companies) in the development of national ID card schemes, and introduces the idea of “card cartels” for identification systems in today’s digitalized world. He argues that while states “may still validate identity,” they are unable to act on their own but must “depend on the high-tech corporations [such as IBM] for the know-how, on softwares for the means of ‘managing’ identities and on international standards bodies […] for achieving interoperability.”
Edward Higgs, one of the few historians of identification interested in the role of commercial bodies, stresses the importance of historical changes in identity management, from state dominance to more dispersed and commercial identification systems in the last two decades of the twentieth century. This commercialization of identification was, however, parallel with a movement back to increased state interest in the management of identity control in the new millennium, as a part of counterterrorism and migration policies. In his comprehensive history of personal identification in England, Higgs includes the emergence of tokens of identification in the new mass consumer economy. He refers here to credit and debit cards backed up by signatures, and later by PIN codes, as new “tokens of identity.” He also highlights the role of new identification technologies introduced by commercial organizations in the recent past, for example, how digitalization made detailed consumer profiling possible.
The role of Swedish banks in managing not only strictly commercial but also official (or at least quasi-official) identities from as far back as the 1960s is important because similar examples are lacking in the history of identification. Also, the story of twentieth-century identification practices in Sweden—by either state authorities or commercial institutions—is yet untold. There are a few studies on identity documents in older historical periods (from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) and historical work on the politics of privacy in the data age. However, these bodies of research and the historical studies of the early and well-developed Swedish system of national registration also stress the role of state authorities, along with that of the church in the early period. Moreover, a strong “state embrace” of the individual is generally seen as typical of Swedish twentieth-century history. This makes my findings even more intriguing.
So how can we understand the connection between banks and identification, and why is it important? Here, we have to consider the distinction, as also made by, for example, Lyon and Robertson, between identity and identification; or, in other words, between embedded (personal and collective) identity and documented official identity. Scholars of identification generally agree that embedded identity (related to family, community, commitment to a place) and documented identity (passport, ID cards) are intricately connected to each other; they not only depend on but also shape each other. Just like the passport has been interpreted in terms of the formation of national identities, it is possible to explore other identity devices in relation to social, cultural, or financial identities.
Now, personal identity literally certified by banks is easily interpreted as a powerful materialization of the birth of new financial subjects and the financialization of everyday life. Although the scope of my study does not allow me to access the self-perceptions of the new ID card holders or their sense of identity, I can highlight the historical connection between the bank identity cards and the creation of a large group of new financial consumers. The sources also reveal that the new identification practices were not unproblematic, as they collided with traditional perceptions of identity and with the cultural stigma of having to prove one’s identity. I will show how the banks attempted to eliminate the shame of identification and naturalized the everyday use of identity cards with reference to money.
The concept of financial identities or financial subjects is recurrently used within social studies of finance, especially in Foucauldian interpretations of the financialized world of the recent past. It highlights the fact that individuals are increasingly categorized in legal, political, and media discourses in terms of financially defined subject positions—and, as a consequence, also see themselves and act accordingly. Typical examples of such financially defined subject positions are the investor, for example, by means of the pension system or the educational system, the borrower on the housing market, or the consumer of banking products and services such as current accounts, bank cards, or insurance.
The financialization of everyday life, according to the growing literature on the concept, includes a predominance of such financial identities and their intrusion into all areas of life; in short, a new relationship between the self and finance. The narrative of financialization runs parallel to and is intertwined with that of neoliberalization and globalization, and is commonly dated to the past three decades.
In fact, several studies of identification and surveillance refer to Nikolas Rose’s concept of “control society,” which belongs to the same theoretical tradition as the works on financialized identity positions. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Rose describes a historical transition from societies of discipline—in which dominant institutions such as the school or the factory directly molded the conduct of large groups of people—to societies of control—in which the “conduct of the conduct” is done at a distance, not centralized but “dispersed and disorganized.” In a society of control, Rose argues in accordance with the theory of governmentality, individuals are identified and governed by means of their different activities of working and consuming. Rose (writing in the 1990s) emphasized that commercial forces often exercise this dispersed control in contemporary society.
In his study of credit markets, Gilles Laferté proposes two ideal typical concepts to characterize two fundamentally different types of economic exchanges: the older face-to-face economy, built on small-scale, shared economic affiliations and social networks, and the newer economic identification economy, consisting of “mediated, remote forms of exchange.” The economic identification economy relies on technologically advanced and standardized gathering of information on a very large number of individuals. Laferté’s main example is that of credit reports by credit bureaus having become a prerequisite for contemporary consumer credit.
To summarize, commercial engagement in identification is lacking in the historical research; and in those rare cases when commercial identification is discussed, it is explained with reference to the financialization of recent decades. Building on the insights from these scholars but also in important respects differing from their views, I argue that the history of the development of the Swedish bank identity is best described in terms a financial identification society. In this society, the banks developed a central position not only in everyday identity management for financial purposes but also in validating “official” identities in society. This happened with support from authorities (and not least with use of the national registration number), but not under state control. The process started as early as the 1960s. This contradicts conventional historical studies of identification and, in fact, also the work on financialization, as it reveals that a modern concept of financial identity materialized before the era of digitalization and financialization.
The article will show how something that started as a complementary tool for administering consumer finances eventually transformed older identification practices based on class/community/status/personal acquaintance into a general and nationally valid management of formalized individual identity. Swedish banks, already in the 1960s—thus prior to the digital age—became the main identificators in society, which, of course, reinforced the connection between personal identity and finance.'‘Disaster citizenship’: an emerging framework for understanding the depth of digital citizenship in Pakistan' by Ayesha Siddiqi in (2018) 26(2) Contemporary South Asia 157-174 comments
In recent years, the Pakistani state has made significant advances in formalising and universalising citizenship through the digitisation of citizenship numbers. The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) is at the forefront of this initiative, which has now covered 96% of Pakistan’s 180 million citizens. The state successfully used this digitisation of citizenship to reach out to its citizens in the aftermath of a large-scale flooding disaster in 2010 and 2011. The universal cash transfer programme instituted for disaster-affected households used citizenship numbers to identify and then provide ATM cards to those domiciled in the worst-affected regions.Siddiqi states
This paper draws upon my fieldwork done in 2012–2013 in Lower Sindh and argues that while still in its infancy, a new form of ‘disaster citizenship’ is visible in southern Pakistan, which is driven partially by this digitisation of citizenship in the country. It explores the post-disaster political space where state actors and citizens came to interact with each other, and argues that these informal and unplanned interactions overlapped with formal policy to result in a new and emerging form of ‘disaster citizenship’ in the region.
This paper offers intimate insight into the state–citizen relationship, and how it evolves, in the aftermath of large-scale disasters. Using the case of Pakistan, and based on empirical evidence from the province of Sindh in the south of the country, it argues that contrary to received wisdom, a large-scale flooding disaster in the region did not result in a damaged ‘social contract’ between the state and the citizen (Pelling and Dill 2010). Rather, it demonstrates that the political space that opened in the aftermath of the disaster enabled a more progressive ‘disaster citizenship’ to emerge. The role of Pakistan’s social registry system and a formalised identity (ID) regime played a critical role in pushing this relationship along.
The ‘social contract’ in this paper refers to a tangible relationship between the state and its people consisting of two basic conditions: (i) a state that sees its citizens as its responsibility; (ii) citizens that demand state action not as passive recipients looking for favours but as an active right of citizenship. Citizenship is increasingly being understood as constitutive of both formal-legal rights and also of informal claims. Jayal’s work tells us that the former, legal-official recognition of citizenship, has been interpreted as an ‘affective notion’ of belonging and ID, or as entirely ‘instrumental’ to enable access to social goods, or even something completely different depending on the subject position of those seeking the formal recognition (Jayal 2013). Hence if even the thinnest description of citizenship holds such diverse meaning in different social groups and contexts, identifying and constructing informal citizenship is especially complex. Substantiated through social relations and a range of demands on state authorities, using intermediaries and a variety of moral positions, these ‘substantive’ conditions of citizenship create new kinds of rights. They are based on ‘exigencies of lived experience, outside of the normative and institutional definitions of the state and its legal codes’ (Holston 1998 ). The ways in which an unfolding climatic disaster impacts this substantive citizenship is the unique contribution of this paper.
In the summer of 2010 and 2011, Pakistan was devastated by large-scale flooding of the Indus River. The floods of 2010 affected the entire country and in August of that year the UN declared that one-fifth of Pakistan’s entire landmass was under water (Masood and Drew 2010). In terms of people affected, the UN also estimated that it was the ‘greatest humanitarian crisis in recent history’. At over 20 million affected, the number of victims of this disaster was more than the Asian tsunami (2004), Kashmir earthquake (2005) and Haiti earthquake (2010) put together (Tweedie 2010 ). The floods the following year were limited in their geographical scope and primarily affected the province of Sindh. The scale of the disaster was still enormous and it affected over 5 million people. Based on empirical evidence from the ground, in the two years following these floods, this research demonstrates that the formal and informal processes implemented after a large-scale disaster resulted in a new and unique experience of citizenship in Pakistan.
The flooding disaster in 2010 and 2011 was considerably more serious than previous climatic disasters, it was however not just the number of people affected by the devastation that made this a particularly interesting moment to study state–citizen relations. Rather, in a significant departure from previous ad hoc and sporadic state interventions, the Pakistani state provided universal disaster relief to its citizens through a cash transfer made out to all households domiciled in the disaster-affected region. This was made possible in large part due to an up-to-date social registry maintained by the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) in Pakistan. This relatively new intervention implemented through new processes made this an exciting time to study the changing social contract and evolving citizenship and how people in a country like Pakistan were interpreting it.
Geographers working on natural disasters highlight the ‘transformative political space’ opened in the aftermath of a disaster. They illustrate that a disaster is able to serve as a ‘tipping point’, creating a moment for political change (Pelling and Dill 2010 ). Others argue that in politically turbulent parts of the world, disasters are ‘more frequently followed by political unrest than peace’ (LeBillion and Waizenegger 2007). While writing after Hurricane Katrina, an American scholar analyses the disaster as a moment when the state failed its citizens in the US. He argues that ‘when the levees broke, the contract of American citizenship failed’ and hundreds of thousands suffered in New Orleans (Ignatieff 2005). Disasters are therefore typically seen to be disruptive of the social contract (Warner 2013). After the large-scale flooding disaster that affected Pakistan in 2010 and 2011, international media outlets were reporting a similar story. They stated that the state had failed its citizens – not once but twice – in the aftermath of the disaster (BBC online 2011) ‘damaging’ the country’s ‘fragile democracy’ (The Guardian online 2010 ).
I however argue in this paper that the disaster unleashed forces for ‘transformative’ change by opening political space for the post-disaster state and its citizens to interact with one another. I explain how and why the state reached out universally to all its citizens in affected areas, using disaster relief that it provided through a cash transfer distributed to all households using digitised ID cards. The widespread coverage of NADRA-issued ID cards has been an important instrument in this new phase in state–citizen relations. I demonstrate that both actors, the state and its citizens, interacted along official and unofficial lines after the flooding disaster to create an outcome that was able to push a more progressive form of ‘disaster citizenship’ along. In particular, this paper shows how an unprecedented state-led disaster intervention drive, interacted with an enabling political context to induce demands and encouraged citizens to demand more from their social contract. Substantively, this resulted in disaster relief being understood as an aspect of citizenship, or an informal right, in southern Pakistan.
