Santiago Mandirola is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. His research is focused on financial technology, consumer credit scoring, and financial inclusion in Latin America, with an emphasis on how these technologies reshape the people they refer to and the places in which they are deployed. Santiago holds an M.A. in Sociology from The New School and an undergraduate degree in Sociology from the University of Buenos Aires. His work has been partially supported by a National Science Foundation DDRI grant in science and technology studies.

At GIDEST, Santiago will investigate how South American e-commerce and telecommunications platforms offer alternative financial services to “thin-file” users, who lack access to a bank account, a robust credit history, or a steady job, and whose “good performance” as borrowers is thus invisible to traditional credit institutions. Given their nature and regional context, these projects are always introduced to the public as driven by a mission: that of furthering financial inclusion in Latin America. Taking this into account, Santiago’s research will explore how these platforms collect user information and transform it into commercially valuable knowledge and how their mobile apps are designed in order to foster users’ entrepreneurship.