The Pursuit of Perfect Control and Ultimate Outreach: Social Fintech Platforms, Microcredit Agents and Surveillance

We investigate the case of a Microcredit Platform that offers financial services in an impoverished region of Brazil. Through this case, we verify how the intermediation of human microcredit agents is essential to create critical mass that guarantee engagement of potential clients. We critically analyze the role of these agents disseminating microcredit as essential for the outreach of financial services on the edge of the traditional financial system. On the one hand, by collecting information, as well as acting on credit recovery, those microcredit agents reduce the information asymmetry in the process of granting credit to micro-entrepreneurs. On the other hand, acting as brokers to a platform, their role can also be understood as an element intended to connect micro-entrepreneurs to algorithms and to constantly monitor them. With close relationships in the community in which they operate, microcredit agents have an expanded capacity for real-time surveillance.