A Short Genealogy of the Consumer FinTech Brand

I want to talk about the mutation of the visual and affective register of financial infrastructure over the past decade. But we need to prepare.

Let us start off with the classical bureaucratic disciplinary structure of static control (imagine walking to a bank, standing in line, making a deposit, talking to a real person). Well, that milieu might be at the brink of extinction and it will most likely give way to the increasing platformization of finance.

Preparation: The Disciplinary Mold

Think of the classical infrastructure of a bank in the conventional Foucauldian understanding of an apparatus. There is, first, a specific enclosed physical space, and this fact alone is less trivial than it sounds. The bank keeps hours, sometimes extended, rarely unlimited; there is a ticket, a queue, a designated place to stand and a designated order in which to stand there. The interior architecture functions as a mode of subjectivation precisely because it is so relentlessly generic: every branch, in every country, arranges doors, queues, tellers, and windows into functionally identical configurations, so that a body trained in one is already trained in all of them, disciplined into a shared choreography of navigating, waiting, and speaking in the particular register a bank requires.

The teller operates as the first line of defense within the panopticonic assemblage of identity verification and institutional authority, an individual node responsible for approving or refusing this or that transaction, and constrained in turn by a whole secondary architecture of discipline invisible to the customer: the work schedule, the internal company regulation, the health and safety code, the anti-money-laundering statute enforced at the level of individual judgment rather than an algorithm, the union-negotiated break, the dress code, the script for greeting and the script for refusal, the entire micro-choreography of gesture and permissible speech that Goffman would have recognized as readily as Foucault. The apparatus does not end at the counter obviously; like Lyotard’s postmodern Wittgensteinian language-games, the dispositif has no clear beginning and no clear boundary. It extends in multiple directions: backward into the training manual, the performance review, the mandatory compliance seminar, and forward into the customer, disciplined by the same architecture from the opposite side of the glass, told where to stand, what number to hold, what tone to use, what document to produce and in what sequence, on pain of returning tomorrow to repeat the whole procedure from the queue onward.

Enumerate the artifacts of this disciplinary mode and the list keeps generating more of itself, comically long and comically consistent across borders, currencies, and decades: the numbered ticket, dispensed from a machine, converting an arriving body into a position in a sequence; the rope-and-post queue, a piece of furniture whose sole function is choreographing waiting bodies; the teller’s window, at once barrier and confessional, through which identity documents pass and judgments are rendered; the photo identification, the proof of address, the signature card, each a small bureaucratic sacrament performed identically by clerks who have never met and would nonetheless recognize each other’s gestures on sight; the fixed opening hours printed on the door, disciplining the customer’s entire relationship to time, banking hours constituting a genre of time unto itself, largely hostile to the rhythms of the waged labor it claims to serve; the security guard, present, uniformed, a low-grade sovereign violence held permanently in reserve; the vault door and the visible thickness of concrete and steel, architecture functioning as a rhetoric of trust achieved through the display of force; the internal memo and the employee handbook, the disciplinary apparatus turned inward on its own staff, producing the teller as surely as the teller produces the customer; and beneath all of it, the ledger, of course: physical, bound, signed, an object whose authority rested on its very immobility, its resistance to casual alteration, its status as a thing that had to be walked to in order to be consulted at all.

I think I got the point across.

What we are looking at here is the mold, in the Deleuzian sense. The term is borrowed from Simondon. The mold is a diagram for an entire domain of Foucauldian dispositifs. Specifically those described and pedantically enumerated above, referred to as ‘disciplinary’. The mold is a fixed form into which the subject is poured, so to speak, held, and released, and the process is repeated in sequence. Classical examples of molds are schools, barracks, hospitals, and less obviously – banks.

From Mold to Modulation

Furthermore, observe that the mold, however ploddingly enumerated above (I feel like I owe you an apology), is not the whole story, and it would be a mistake to let discipline absorb everything simply because both discipline and what comes after it happen to converge, historically, on the same architectural arrangements. The bank as barracks, as school, as hospital-with-interest-rates, is a disciplinary diagram in Foucault’s early sense: power exercised directly on bodies, through enclosure, timetable, and hierarchical observation. But the subject who walks into the bank to open a savings account, to apply for a loan, is not primarily, not fundamentally, a disciplined body. They are a homo œconomicus, and the homo œconomicus belongs to a different, later, and only partially compatible problematic of liberal governmentality.

Liberal governmentality does not mold the subject, though it can operate in a way that is adjacent to disciplinary power. Liberal forms of governance focus instead on constructing the milieu within which an already-rational, already self-interested subject is free to roam and calculate their utility. Notice, there are no quotation marks around the word ‘free’. Governmentality does not tell you where to stand, how to behave, to stand upright, speak or be silent. It sets the interest rate, and expects you to do the rest, which in most cases, for better or worse, is exactly what we do. So the disciplinary bank is not a neat category for the mold. It is already a pathological hybrid. A kind of chimera: architecturally a mold, but economically already presupposing a subject built for something closer to modulation. Now, a “modulated” rational actor is a calculating agent whose conduct needs to be conducted, not through prohibition, nor any explicit system of commands, but through shaping the field of possible action. Governmentality, in other words, is an outgrowth of the mold.

A module is different from a mold. Personally, I love how the distinction is drawn in Deleuze’s 1981 lectures On Painting, much more than the popular text on control societies. A module is an infinite mold. Modulation implies molding continuously. Modulation is mold inside a cybernetic feedback mechanism. The algorithm, the Instagram feed, the FYP, these are classical examples of modulatory apparatuses. We can trace therefore an oversimplified diagram as history would allow: The subject of discipline, partially modulated, becomes homo oeconomicus, the homo oeconomicus modulated further, at higher speeds, intensities and frequencies becomes homo oeconomicus algorismus. I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Digital Bank: Modulation in the Subjunctive

 The first rupture is the digital bank: telephone banking, then online banking, then the ATM’s slow colonization of the street. Access is freed from opening hours; labor-exploitation is further unlocked in the Heideggerian sense, as a 24/7 standing reserve (bestand), the queue dissolves into an online registration and a login screen. These were major developments in technology, infrastructure, communication and of course, a major development in the social power-matrix.

But the digital bank remains, for all its novelty, a transitional form, because it is still organized around the spectral image of its analog counterpart. Even with internet banking, you are not in a constant communication with an individualized algorithm. Your internet activity is still segmented into discrete online visits to the portal. The homo oeconomicus is visiting rather than inhabiting the online portal. The modulatory potential of surveillance is still in its infancy. It is hesitant, the mold has cracked, but the module is still incomplete. What seems to bring the modulatory potential of digital governance to a blossoming completion, or at least enacting its next stage, is a new entity of the platform: The FinTech Brand.

Modulation in the Indicative

The consumer FinTech brand marks a moment where the bank extends itself into the private interiority of the subject. The line that separates one’s personal life from one’s financial life is becoming increasingly blurred. There is no more portal, no gate, there is instead a multiplicity of interactive zones. Zones of indiscernibility where digital language-games are constantly negotiating the boundary between “me” and my “service provider”.

And this brings us directly to the visual and affective register where modulation reigns as both base and superstructure, if you still want to be orthodox about it. The classical bank relied on an aesthetics of sovereignty: heavy marble columns, cold polished brass, intimidating vault steel, dark suits, oppressive silence that made you feel small and, I guess, poor. The FinTech apparatus has inverted the register. What used to be the dazzling architecture of awe is now the subtle, almost imperceptible UI of intimacy.

Look at the visual artifacts of the consumer FinTech brand: the pastel-colored, matte-finish physical card, hot coral, electric turquoise, translucent neon, sleek minimalist obsidian. Looks more like a fashion accessory, or a Baudrillardian gadget, a status symbol, or a piece of high-design jewelry. It’s all about me, you, the client – it is the user that has become the center of observation. The user and the user’s debt. Now look at the software interface and its regime of visibilities: rounded sans-serif typography, dark-mode gradients, playful micro-animations, digital confetti bursting across the OLED screen. You get prizes, gifts, discounts! Congratulations! Every day is an accomplishment. You are now the sovereign, the monarch. Where the old bank was an intimidating king, the consumer brand is your personal jester, the flatterer. Where the old bank imposed a cold institutional distance, the Fintech dispositif performs a cuddly, ambient proximity. It is “vibe banking.” Financial control re-packaged as soft-touch lifestyle design.

The visual softening is crucial because it facilitates a profound affective shift. The feeling of entering a financial relation is now libidinally charged in a completely different way. Instead of the old strategy of anxiety, institutional friction, or moral judgment, it is one of self-care, play, and seamless convenience. It creeps up on you. The platform doesn’t say “you owe us, prove your creditworthiness.” It says “hey, treat yourself; we’ll round up the change from that coffee into your rainy-day jar.” So, control enters through the warm, omnipresent glow of push notifications. It becomes entirely informal and thereby invisible.

Blackcat: From Interface to Ecosystem

Image: Blackcat, “Fiat Wallet With Card | Multi Currency Wallet” page, blackcat.app

The homepage of the Blackcat application invites users with the slogan “Where Money’s At.” Rather than presenting finance as an institution governed by procedures, obligations and regulation, it presents it as a place to inhabit: a lifestyle organized around convenience, rewards and effortless participation. The application promises an “all-in-one” experience where payments, transfers, cards and multiple wallets dissolve into a continuous interface. Cashback programmes, promotional offers and conversational language further soften the relationship between user and institution. The platform does not present itself as a bureaucratic authority demanding compliance; it presents itself as a friendly companion integrated into everyday life. We see vibe banking at work: finance becomes less associated with formality, distance or discipline and increasingly with familiarity, affect and frictionless experience. The interface stages an atmosphere where financial services appear less as regulated institutions than as seamlessly woven elements of everyday life.

Beneath this apparent simplicity lies a more significant transformation. To understand Blackcat today as merely a payment card or mobile application is to mistake the visible interface for the financial system it mediates. The card remains materially present, but its analytical significance has changed. It functions less as a standalone product than as an access point into a broader socio-technical arrangement. The card leads to the application; the application leads to a payment account; the payment account depends upon regulated payment infrastructure; and that infrastructure is maintained by licensed institutions operating within European payment schemes and regulatory frameworks. What appears to the consumer as a single financial object increasingly serves as an entry point into a distributed network of legal entities, technical standards, and payment infrastructures.

We have to distinguish between Blackcat as a consumer FinTech brand and Papaya Ltd as the regulated Electronic Money Institution (EMI) that issues and operates the payment services behind it.

The user downloads Blackcat, interacts with Blackcat and develops trust in Blackcat; but the regulatory obligations, safeguarding of client funds, participation in European payment schemes and operational responsibilities belong to Papaya Ltd. The interface performs singularity: one application, one brand, one coherent experience. Institutionally, however, this apparent unity unfolds into a differentiated set of functions including compliance, safeguarding, settlement, account management and participation in European payment infrastructure. The distinction illustrates how contemporary FinTech increasingly separates the phenomenological unity of the consumer experience from the institutional plurality through which that experience is produced. The consumer encounters a unified brand, while the regulated financial institution exists as a differentiated organizational structure.

This organizational heterogeneity extends beyond the relationship between Blackcat and Papaya Ltd. Rather than operating as a self-contained company in the traditional banking sense, Blackcat is better understood as the visible interface of a broader financial ecosystem composed of regulated institutions, payment schemes, technological integrations and specialized service providers. The application integrates with consumer payment platforms such as Apple Pay while relying upon standardized European payment rails and distinct legal entities responsible for different operational functions. Publicly available documentation suggests that the financial service no longer resides within a single organization but emerges from coordinated interactions among multiple actors. In Deleuzian terms, the dividual consumer, ironically, interacts with a seemingly unified digital interface while the institution itself increasingly assumes a modular organizational form. Organizational coherence is produced through assemblage rather than corporate unity, which remains only at the surface.

This evolution also changes the economic role of the consumer application. Recent public materials suggest that Papaya Ltd increasingly presents its regulated payment infrastructure not only as the foundation of the Blackcat consumer platform but also as a service for other regulated financial institutions. Participation in SEPA payment schemes, correspondent services and payment connectivity position the institution simultaneously as a provider of retail payment services and payment infrastructure.

In this context, the Blackcat application assumes a second analytical significance. Beyond functioning as a consumer product, it demonstrates that the underlying payment infrastructure operates under real production conditions. The same regulated infrastructure that supports everyday consumer payments also provides the operational foundation for Papaya Ltd’s broader institutional ambitions. The consumer platform therefore functions not merely as a retail interface but as a continuous demonstration of infrastructure already deployed at scale. What appears as a lifestyle-oriented financial application simultaneously reveals the institutional capacities upon which that experience depends.

The transformation becomes particularly visible in contemporary regulation. The European Union’s Instant Payments Regulation increases the operational demands placed upon payment institutions through requirements including continuous availability, Verification of Payee, sanctions screening and operational resilience. These developments should not be understood simply as additional legal obligations imposed upon existing financial institutions. Rather, compliance itself increasingly becomes part of financial infrastructure. The capacity to maintain twenty-four-hour payment operations, implement verification systems and participate effectively in standardized European payment networks becomes part of the technical architecture of finance. For regulated payment institutions, these capabilities increasingly constitute infrastructure rather than just regulatory compliance.

Infrastructure consequently acquires new economic significance. Institutions capable of building and maintaining these capabilities occupy a different position within the European payments ecosystem than those dependent upon external providers. While it would be premature to conclude that regulation directly advantages any particular institution, it is reasonable to suggest that the current regulatory trajectory contributes to a broader shift where infrastructural capacity becomes an increasingly valuable institutional asset.

Seen through the lens of what this essay calls ‘vibe banking,’ Blackcat’s interface and the phenomenology of interface design point toward a complex assemblage of regulated institutions, payment infrastructures, compliance systems, commercial partnerships and European payment architectures. The interface performs intimacy; the institution performs regulation; the infrastructure performs coordination across a network of heterogeneous actors. Power therefore operates simultaneously at several levels: through the affective design that shapes user experience, through institutional arrangements that organize financial activity, and through infrastructures that govern the circulation of money.

Blackcat is significant in this context not because its institutional model is somehow unique, but because it renders broader transformations in contemporary European finance unusually visible. The relationship between a consumer-facing brand and the regulated infrastructure supporting it illustrates how value increasingly migrates from products alone toward the institutional capacities that make those products possible. Consumer experience remains essential, yet it increasingly depends upon infrastructures whose legal, operational and regulatory complexity remains largely invisible to the user.

The genealogy traced throughout this essay thereby does not culminate in what “experts” often predicted as the disappearance of banking, but in the reorganization of finance into a layered institutional ecosystem whose complexity is rendered experientially distant through the coherence of its interface. Banking has not become less institutional. Rather, institutional complexity has receded from the surface of everyday experience while remaining structurally indispensable to the functioning of the system as such.

—

References:

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Translated by James Benedict, Verso, 1996.

Deleuze, Gilles. On Painting: Courses, March–June 1981. Edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Charles J. Stivale, University of Minnesota Press, 2025.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, vol. 59, 1992, pp. 3–7.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1995.

Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books, 1959.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Harper Perennial, 1977.

Lyotard, Jean-Franç The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

McMillan, Jonathan. The End of Banking: Money, Credit, and the Digital Revolution. Zero/One Economics GmbH, 2014.

Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. Translated by Taylor Adkins, University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell, 1953.

—

Author Bio:

Giorgi Vachnadze is a philosopher, writer, and Lead Editor at Becoming Press. His work moves across philosophy of technology, discourse analysis, and the politics of language, drawing primarily on Foucault and Wittgenstein. He is the author of Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence (Becoming Press, 2024) and holds an MA in Philosophy from KU Leuven. He is Vice President of the Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation (LCP) and Presidium Member of the European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (EUASU).