Financial technologies are transforming the international banking industry and generating significant value. They have had many positive impacts in developing economies including assisting in the delivery of development aid, reducing the number of unbanked individuals and improving the resilience of the marginalized in society. At the same time the potential conflicting intersection of an international, winner-takes-all, hyper-scalable fintech with localized traditional banking organizations in weak regulatory environments, creates a “perfect storm” in which local banks and weak developing economy institutions are overwhelmed. The new technologies also have the potential of exasperating the digital divide leading to even greater levels of inequality. This paper examines some of the potential issues from a consumer perspective that might arise from fintech implementation in developing economies, examines the underlying ethical factors and proposes actions for the public, private and civil society sector to reduce the impact of the coming storm.

The rapid advancement of AI technologies, particularly in law enforcement, has sparked intense societal debates about their moral implications and societal impact. This study examines how organizations manage evolving AI-related societal issues through the strategic use of ambiguity, addressing a gap in our understanding of organizational responses to AI moral concerns. We focus on ShotSpotter, an AI-powered gunshot detection system and analyze a decade of organizational communications and public discourse around its moral implications and societal impact (2014-2024). By combining issue life cycle and strategic ambiguity frameworks, we develop a process model demonstrating how organizations adapt their ambiguity strategies as AI issues progress from factual to moral debates, moving through emergence, growth, and maturity stages. This research contributes to understanding the relationship between AI technologies, organizational strategies, and societal concerns, offering insights into the challenges of aligning technological innovation with societal expectations.

Through content moderation practices – the screening user-generated content posted to Internet sites and social media - well-meaning platform companies seek to balance freedom of speech with a duty of care towards users. While most ‘big tech’ firms have active policies on content moderation, we still know little of the internal processes and systems through which content moderation is activated, and the repercussions it may have for business and society. We investigate the ways in which online platforms engage in content moderation by combining legitimacy with insights from deliberative democracy to explore legitimacy construction in ‘moral’ contexts and organizations as judgment validation institutions. In doing so, we examine an exemplary, time-bounded case (Yin, 2009) of the cloud-based website platform ‘Genesis’ (pseudonym) with over 200 million users across the globe. Our longitudinal data collection process spans a ten-year period from 2014 to 2024 and involves interviews, particiant observation and document / newspaper analysis. It is clear from our evolving findings that legitimacy perceptions influence the quality and scope of the deliberative processes promoted by online platforms and we find that organizational members engage in three processes of deliberation where circumventions of traditional content moderation systems occur in the pursuit of various legitimacy perceptions. We aim to contribute to research that examines the role of platform companies in shaping democracy and social justice through an in-depth qualitative analysis of content moderation practices in a global organization.