Redistributive imaginaries, post-humanitarianism, and the ‘spirit of digital capitalism’

Our primary interest in this article is neither donations as such nor payment providers, but their relation to what we call, following Rebecca Bramall and Mercè Oliva (Reference Bramall and Oliva2023), redistributive imaginaries. This concept – which is linked strongly to imagined futures – allows us to show in what way transactions that aim to ‘do good’ on a fintech platform’s donation marketplace are bound up with ideas and aspirations about the nature of financial resources and how they should be redistributed in the digital age. In this section of the article, we introduce the concept of redistributive imaginaries before outlining two further strands of literature that are crucial to the argument we will develop: first, recent studies on digital ‘prosocial’ giving, which diagnose a shift from a ‘humanitarian’ to a ‘post-humanitarian sensibility’ and, second, accounts of the current ‘digital spirit of capitalism’ and the role of ethical solutionism within it. A third important strand, exploring literature on payment and platformization, will be introduced in the fourth section.

What, then, are redistributive imaginaries, and what does it mean to say – as we are claiming here – that they are being reconfigured through digital platforms? In a context like contemporary Switzerland, giving through donations is embedded in a landscape of non-market transactions that, to some extent, re-arrange the distribution of financial resources, for purposes in accordance with values such as solidarity, societal cohesion, alleviation of suffering, or equality. This takes place within an economy that is otherwise organized predominately around markets and the valorization and accumulation of capital, that is a capitalist mode of production.Footnote ¹ Redistribution refers primarily to ‘corrective’, post-market mechanisms: It includes state-mandated requirements and mechanisms, such as tax paying, which finance what we refer to as the ‘welfare state’, but also voluntary forms such as donating or participating in crowdfunding drives, as well as ‘strong’, but not legally binding norms such as tithing, Zakat or Tzedakah for religious believers. In casting the conceptual net for redistribution this wide, we follow Gibson-Graham’s approach to ‘diverse economies’ (Gibson-Graham, Reference Gibson-Graham2008), which decenters the capitalist market by foregrounding ‘other’ economic practices. At the same time, as our analysis will show, we are particularly interested in how these ‘other’ practices, in the domain of redistribution, may themselves be shaped by the expansion of market-based forms, commodification, and commercially designed technology.

‘Imaginaries’ can be conceptualized as shared understandings that make sense of and enable social practices (Taylor, Reference Taylor2004). Contemporary concepts of social imaginaries can be traced back primarily to Cornelius Castoriadis (Reference Castoriadis1987), whose work has been developed further for social science and cultural studies by scholars such as Charles Taylor, Bob Jessop, and Sheila Jasanoff. Jessop’s definition of imaginaries as ‘semiotic systems that frame individual subjects’ lived experience of an inordinately complex world and/or inform collective calculation about that world’ (Jessop, Reference Jessop2010: 344) is constitutive for our approach, as is Jasanoff’s (Reference Jasanoff2015) notion of socio-technical imaginaries. Whereas the former focuses primarily on understandings of the economy and its separateness from other social domains, the latter is concerned more with technology itself: For Jasanoff, ‘technologies can operate as ‘performative scripts’ that materialize imaginaries and make them tangible’ (Bramall and Oliva, Reference Bramall and Oliva2023: 5). Through technologies and institutions – such as, in our case, digital payment systems and donations marketplaces – imaginaries become ‘collective, durable, [and] capable of being performed’ (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff2015: 9). Jasanoff and her co-authors also underscore the futurity and normativity of imaginaries: The latter, ‘in this sense, at once describe attainable futures and prescribe futures that (…) ought to be attained’ (Jasanoff and Kim, Reference Jasanoff and Kim2009: 120). Like Jessop, the authors stress that imaginaries have both a descriptive and a normative side – in our case, they concern how redistribution takes place and how it should and will take place in the future.

Redistributive imaginaries, then, are socio-culturally powerful understandings – linguistic-discursive representations, but also images, fantasies, and attached emotional valences (Clarke, Reference Clarke2014: 98) – of the mechanisms by which financial resources are redistributed in society, and of their future trajectories. To scrutinize such ‘ethico-political horizons for envisioning and enacting collective life’ (DeChaine, Reference DeChaine, Givoni, Ross and Orgad2021: 301) in the realm of redistribution, we introduce a new heuristic framework for examining and comparing the composition of redistributive imaginaries and the ways in which they inform world-making. We posit that redistributive imaginaries are composed of elements that contain ideas about: (a) what regularized forms of redistribution exist in society (institutions); (b) how redistribution is executed practically, how and by whom and through which technology and media it is (and should be) organized (mechanisms); (c) who is obliged and/or motivated to ‘pay in’ to these mechanisms of redistribution and why (donor-subjects); (d) who is and who is not deserving of support and through which kind of redistribution (receiver-subjects); (e) what kinds of social relationships emerge from redistributive acts (relationality); (f) to what extent and in what contexts these overall forms/mechanisms are fair, just, legitimate or prudent, and how one should feel about them (legitimation); (g) how voluntary and state-mandated forms of ‘contributing’ through financial transfers interrelate, and how the borders between different economic domains (that is, a world of competition in business versus a world of solidarity on a community level) are drawn and should be drawn (domain boundaries); (h) where the institutional and geographic boundaries of redistributive responsibility are drawn (geographic boundaries); and (i) in what future direction redistributive arrangements are currently developing (vectors of change).

In the following examination of Twint’s app-based donations platform, we focus on mechanisms, donor-subjects, legitimation, relationality, and vectors of change. We will show how they configure what we call a post-sovereign consumer-citizen redistributive imaginary. Within the institutional context of donations, the latter draws on and pushes a market and consumer choice framework (mechanism) and is bound up with an ideology of technological solutionism, conveyed through a specific ethical rhetoric (legitimation), and a behavioral-economic set of ideas about human subjectivity (donor-subjects) and its relation to the social (relationality).

Our examination of this imaginary also builds on research into distinct forms of redistributive practices and the imaginaries that give meaning to them. From this body of literature, the imaginary of the nation-based European welfare state stands out as the most prominent example of a redistributive imaginary. While this potent imaginary is organized around mechanisms of obligatory tax payment and citizens’ entitlement – albeit contested – to welfare provision (Bramall, Reference Bramall2016; Clarke, Reference Clarke and Seeleib-Kaiser2008; Jorge, Oliva, and Aguiar, Reference Jorge, Oliva and Aguiar2021; Sheild Johansson, Reference Sheild Johansson2020; Streinzer, Reference Streinzer2023), studies on the crafting of imaginaries in the fields of crowdsourcing (Certomà, Corsini, and Frey, Reference Certomà, Corsini and Frey2020) or charitable giving (Bajde, Reference Bajde2012) highlight how this is complemented by imaginaries that center redistributive mechanisms based on voluntariness and benevolence.

A prominent strand in the literature focuses on voluntary charitable contributions in the realm of international humanitarian aid. Aimed at alleviating ‘distant suffering’ (Boltanski, Reference Boltanski1999) on the basis of a universal humanity, the social imaginaries of humanitarianism (DeChaine, Reference DeChaine2002; Reference DeChaine, Givoni, Ross and Orgad2021) and a corresponding depolitized ‘emergency imaginary’ (Calhoun, Reference Calhoun, Fassin and Pandolfi2010) can also be analyzed as entailing ideas about redistributive measures, although the discursive register of redistribution is usually absent in this context. Scholarship that engages with the socio-technological dimension of imaginary creation in the context of humanitarian giving critically examines shifts brought about by ‘technologized humanitarian communication’ (Chouliaraki, Reference Chouliaraki2010: 121) and an ‘appification’ of everyday humanitarianism’ (Ølgaard, Reference Ølgaard2022: 197), supported by case studies of platformized practices of humanitarian campaigning (Madianou, Reference Madianou2013), micro-lending (Schwittay, Reference Schwittay2019), crowdfunding (Banerjee, Reference Banerjee2022), or donating on a World Food Programme app (Ølgaard, Reference Ølgaard2022; Ølgaard and Richey, Reference Ølgaard and Richey2024). When focusing on everyday practices of humanitarianism that take place outside of formal structures, Lisa Ann Richey (Reference Richey2018) identifies (digital) mediatization and marketization as its contemporary key themes. The latter two tendencies engender digital practices that enmesh the ‘traditional humanitarian principle’ with ‘mundane micro-practices that aim at personal gratification, such as the click of the mouse or an e-signature’ (Richey, Reference Richey2018: 626). Thus, technology like the World Food Programme app is analyzed as fostering an imaginary that foregrounds ‘the desires of the self as the main motivation for humanitarian action’ (Ølgaard and Richey, Reference Ølgaard and Richey2024: 1465–6). Lilie Chouliaraki speaks of an emerging ‘post-humanitarian sensibility’ that privileges the donor’s sentiments and short-term, low-intensity ‘practices of playful consumerism’ (Chouliaraki, Reference Chouliaraki2010: 107).

This strand of literature on (post-)humanitarian redistributive practices and affects elucidates how, in current socio-technical imaginaries, the technology-subject-nexus takes center stage. We, too, will investigate redistributive imaginaries as intertwined with ideas of subjectivity and shifting modes of governmentality (Foucault, Reference Foucault2008), as they can be seen as implied in the briefly sketched out accounts of ‘(post-)humanitarian selves’ above. Imaginaries contain strong views about how subjects act and should act and how they should be shaped and ‘governed’ – not only by states, but also by commercial and third sector actors. Moreover, political rationalities and techniques of power to ‘guide’ subjects can, as we will elaborate in our analysis of platformized giving on an app, be imbued in technology itself (Gritsenko and Wood, Reference Gritsenko and Wood2022).

What is missing in the work referenced above, however, is a more substantive connection to economic strategies in platformized fintech, and also to their cultural legitimization. Our study adds to the literature by investigating the implications of the ongoing digitalization of donating for redistributive imaginaries within contexts that are directly shaped by the financial industry, that is, banks and fintech companies. When examining a digital donation marketplace on a payment app, the intersection of the tech and finance sectors emerges as a key site of imaginary creation. Work on the ‘digital spirit of capitalism’ usefully highlights the relation between tech-industry ideologies, imaginaries of redistribution, and the employment of ethical rhetoric as a version of ‘good’. Oliver Nachtwey and Timo Seidl have shown how ‘digital solutionism’ paints a picture where ‘making money and making the world a better place are not contradictory but can and should go hand in hand’ (Nachtwey and Seidl, Reference Nachtwey and Seidl2023: 97), so that, in this view, ethically ‘good’ philanthropic infrastructures can be seen as an extension of entrepreneurial action. We will build on their examination of digital elites’ ideas and self-understanding by expanding into a field not addressed by their work and related research, adding to insights into the forms and dynamics of what they call an ‘ethic of solutionism’ (Nachtwey and Seidl, Reference Nachtwey and Seidl2023: 98), and into the relationship between ethical rhetoric and tech-optimism, which is also pivotal for understanding the current socio-technical conjuncture and the app under consideration here.

Data and methods

To trace this emerging redistributive imaginary of platformized giving, we will examine two of its ‘production sites’ – the Twint app’s donation interface and verbal discourse about it. We will investigate the ‘performative scripts’ (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff2015) activated by practical affordances and semiotic framings of the Twint app’s donation marketplace itself, and we will examine how corporate spokespeople attribute meaning to the latter, as well as to its societal role and envisaged impact.

To do so, we will firstly introduce Twint and RaiseNow and their business models (sections four and five), as a prerequisite for our culturally focused investigation. In addition to situating them in literature about platformized finance, we reviewed articles concerning the companies from the Swiss financial press (Handelszeitung, Bilanz), a trade publication (PAY), and a newspaper (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) as well as from finance sector blogs (Finews, Moneytoday, Inside Paradeplatz). These sources were used for all sections.

In section six, we then move to what happens at the Twint/RaiseNow app interface in practical-material as well as symbolic terms. Here, we build on an interface analysis with both a socio-semiotic (Scolari, Reference Scolari2018; Reference Scolari2004; Kress and Van Leeuwen, Reference Kress and Van Leeuwen2020) and an affordance-oriented approach (Ash et al., Reference Ash, Anderson, Gordon and Langley2018; Ronzhyn, Cardenal, and Batlle, Reference Ronzhyn, Cardenal and Batlle Rubio2023; Light, Burgess, and Duguay, Reference Light, Burgess and Duguay2018). Combining them allows an analysis that interrogates the aesthetics, features, functions, interactive possibilities, and propositions of the digital platforms. The aim is to understand how they guide and constrain the users’ actions, how they portray and shape the redistributive circuit, and the practices and actors involved. For an in-depth investigation of the Twint app’s ‘technological mechanisms and embedded cultural references’ (Light et al., Reference Light, Burgess and Duguay2018: 882) – which both tap into and reshape imaginative repertoires – we examine the app’s donation marketplace interface with the walkthrough method. We introduce and discuss data generated by a technical walkthrough, as this method is geared towards identifying cultural values embedded in – and possibly reinforced by – the app (Light et al., Reference Light, Burgess and Duguay2018: 888; see also Amelang, Reference Amelang2023).Footnote ²

In section seven, we turn to a discursive account of what this marketplace is supposed to ‘afford’ and engender. Here, we draw on our second data source, an expert interview we conducted with Twint AG’s Chief Sales Officer (CSO) and RaiseNow’s founder and CEO in 2024 (Interview T/R). The interview allows us to relate the insights from the walkthrough to statements, definitions, and stories of ‘tech elites’ (Brockmann, Drews, and Torpey, Reference Brockmann, Drews and Torpey2021). It is part of a larger sample of interviews with tech-sector participants, aimed at tracing relatively powerful actors and the discourses they initiate and participate in. This resonates with the approaches to studying imaginaries referenced above, which support a focus on sites where future-oriented imaginaries are being produced by actors who command significant resources (Bramall and Oliva, Reference Bramall and Oliva2023: 4).Footnote ³

All material was coded using qualitative research software and analyzed with the aim of building ‘grounded theory’ about emergent prosocial practices and the role of digital technology within them, focusing on themes, semantic frames, narrative means, and the redistributive imaginaries that they evoke and are informed by.Footnote ⁴

Twint, digital payment, and the cultural productivity of platformization

To introduce Twint and the context of its emergence, we embed the history of the company in a review of key arguments from the literature about digital payment and its relation to platformization. This will help situate the strategic, political-economic background of the emergent redistributive imaginary.

Legacy financial institutions and their power are threatened by digital ‘disruption’ (Fasnacht, Reference Fasnacht and Wendt2021). The future of payment transactions and of banking more broadly is contested: In Europe, payment apps continue to be national and far from interoperable, even while behind-the-scenes payment processing has become increasingly standardized. In an ongoing struggle with (primarily US-based and Asian) tech companies, the European legacy finance sector is opting for a digital ‘rebooting’ (Hendrikse, Bassens, and Rossiter, Reference Hendrikse, Bassens and Rossiter2024) by offering a series of apps and other payment options.

The case of Twint exemplifies this constellation and invites us to trace strategies of banks within a state with protectionist tendencies. Twint AG was established in 2016 as a merger of two formerly competing payment app projects. The first was a spin-off from Switzerland’s state bank and statutory service provider PostFinance, while the second was developed by a consortium of other banks. In the new public limited company, PostFinance, the financial service company SIX Group (which operates the Swiss and Spanish stock exchange and payment infrastructure, and is itself owned by banks, most prominently UBS) and major Swiss banks each held a third of the shares. Since 2024, Worldline, a French financial services provider, has acquired a 20% stake, while Swiss Post now holds 27%. It is noteworthy that the latter is an independent but state-owned institution under public law. Here, remarkably, not only ‘mainstream finance’, but also the Swiss Confederation has a stake in developing and controlling a domestic payment infrastructure including a ‘home-grown’ app. Thus, Twint’s development indicates a national ‘protectionist, defensive strategy against the spectrum of foreign BigTech’ (Ferrari, Reference Ferrari2022: 12), in which the interests of legacy finance and the state converge.

The Twint app’s success in replacing cash payments was fostered by ‘accelerated digitalisation’ (Van Zeeland and Pierson, Reference Van Zeeland and Pierson2024) during the COVID-19 pandemic, as contactless payments were encouraged by the authorities to reduce virus contagion. By 2021, cash usage was overtaken in Switzerland for the first time (Graf et al., Reference Graf, Heim, Stadelmann and Trütsch2021) and Twint had won one million new users compared to the previous year (IGEM-Digimonitor, 2021). Now that ‘everyone is there’, the company benefits from the network effect, a signature feature of platform economics. People even use the generic deonymic verb twinten (in German) or twinter (in French) – ‘to twint’ – for transferring money through the app, like ‘to PayPal’ or ‘to Venmo’ in English-speaking countries.

Twint AG capitalizes on multiple revenue streams: charging merchants for payment processing and banks for integration services (such as fees or ‘tolls’; see Maurer, Reference Maurer2012a: 23-24), offering in-app advertising and promotions, and earning from user data insights (Maurer, Reference Maurer2012b: 477; Ferrari, Reference Ferrari2022: 7; Sadowski, Reference Sadowski2019). This is to be understood against the backdrop of capitalist platformization (Poell et al., Reference Poell, Nieborg and Van Dijck2019). As the platform model thrives on ‘a new intermediary logic of data-rich accumulation’ (Langley and Leyshon, Reference Langley and Leyshon2021: 378), transaction data take center stage for commercial strategy. In the payment sector, providers have unique access to the extensive ‘potentiality of information stored within money streams’ (Westermeier, Reference Westermeier2020: 2048). Driven by the prospect of monetizing transaction data, financial services are turning into platforms (Ferrari, Reference Ferrari2022). This turn is ‘not merely a matter of extracting ‘direct rent’ in the form of fees and charges’, but also of ‘extracting ‘indirect rent’ by accruing user data and combining and analyzing it with metadata’ (Langley and Leyshon, Reference Langley and Leyshon2021: 382). Through applications like Twint, the finance industry mimics these tech-industry strategies (O’Dwyer, Reference O’Dwyer2019). The advent of super-apps that confine users to a ‘walled garden’ in which their everyday activities are convened, tracked, and potentially turned into financial value, exemplifies this. Scholars have dubbed this type of strategy the ‘appleization of finance’, where ‘practices from Silicon Valley are spilling over into ‘traditional’ finance’ (Hendrikse et al., Reference Hendrikse, Bassens and Van Meeteren2018: 160). We will discuss below what consequences this has for Twint’s in-app donations feature.

Understanding the financial side of payment platforms is essential background for what follows. However, we engage with and deepen the insight that platformization is not just a matter of economy, nor merely of technology – it is also culturally generative. As Thomas Poell and co-authors put it, platformization ‘leads to the (re)organization of cultural practices around platforms, while these practices simultaneously shape a platform’s institutional dimensions’ (Poell et al., Reference Poell, Nieborg and Van Dijck2019: 6). Donating is one such practice, and Twint’s donation marketplace is one institution where practices of redistribution are being reconfigured. We thus need a broader, cultural sense of what payment is and does. Literature from social anthropology and cultural and media studies usefully conceptualizes payment and ‘New Money’ (Swartz, Reference Swartz2020; see also Maurer, Reference Maurer2012a; Reference Maurer2012b) as forms of communication that can shape identities (for example, those of donors and recipients), social relations (for example, between these identities and intermediaries) and, overall, imaginaries (for example, of redistribution). Reviewing recent changes in payment technology and practices, Sophie Mützel (Reference Mützel2021: 284) observes the ‘re-personalization of money’ as the banking industry turns toward payment platforms. Twint’s embeddedness in social rituals such as sharing food and drinks contributes to the ‘personal’ connotation of this form of payment – as opposed to, for example, debit or credit cards. This helps to associate it with positively connoted practices and sentiments, which Twint’s advertisement and marketing strategies also strategically underline. While on the one hand, Twint co-produces payment infrastructure that is taken for granted and purportedly neutral – a general characteristic of successfully implemented and thus invisible infrastructure – it is also, semiotically, ‘offer(ing) something distinctly Swiss’ (Maeder, Reference Maeder2018), as an article in the financial press puts it. Twint turns its weakness of national limitation – Twint cannot be used abroad – into a strength, by associating itself with local, even embodied and communal meanings and affects, as well as with the national self-image. The brand can thus be described as a deliberately positioned ‘protected and cultivated folklore version of a payment app with self-defined boundaries’ (Maeder, Reference Maeder2018). ‘Swissness’ (Scheidegger, Reference Scheidegger, Decorzant, Heiniger and Reubi2012) is coded as safe, trustworthy, high-quality and stable in this positive, popular self-image: ‘We embody Swiss values and trust in the careful handling of money and data’, Twint’s former CEO is quoted as saying (Maeder, Reference Maeder2015). On this level, the app is connected to positive nation-branding, which makes it a safe and practical tool for charitable redistribution.

Having situated the platform, we will show in the remaining three sections how the redistributive imaginary of Twint’s donations platform is further shaped by promises of ‘good’ technology: ‘better’ companies, ‘better’ ways of donating through ‘better’ markets and subjects, and ‘better’ participation and deliberation.

‘Better’ companies: Fintech for changemaking and ‘ethical glow’

Donating, as an established socio-cultural practice, is widely imagined as ‘good’ and meaningful, as ‘a personal and moral act of solidarity and commitment’ (Bajde, Reference Bajde2012: 360), rather than as transactional or politically contentious. The ‘moral economy’ of donating and its imaginary contrast with – or, perhaps, complement and cushion – the harsh and escalating market-bound economic rationality that is characteristic of other spheres of life (even though humanitarian and charitable giving has always been enmeshed with an array of business elements and today is a highly professionalized field, see, for example, Barnett, Reference Barnett2022).

The fintech company RaiseNow AG is Twint’s ‘partner’ for the donations marketplace. RaiseNow presents itself as a social enterprise and ‘a torchbearer for changemakers’ (RaiseNow, 2025) as it assists the latter in optimizing their fundraising in the charity and nonprofit sector: ‘Helping to initiate change through technology’. They propose their mission in a language of justice with a transformative claim: ‘The world is unjust. We seek to rectify that. We want a future where injustice is eliminated, and where societal, environmental, and economic challenges are addressed.’ As a self-proclaimed ‘ally’ (RaiseNow, 2025) in this endeavor, RaiseNow provide the dominant fundraising infrastructure for Switzerland’s civic society organizations large and small through their collaboration with Twint.

In this rhetoric, the practice of donating becomes integrated into a tech-solutionist imaginary, in which digital solutions and their providers are central and exude a fundamental ‘goodness’ themselves. The tech sector generally tends to surround its products with an ‘ethical glow’: a generic and atmospheric sense of goodness and ethicality, a promise of benign progress and societal improvement, marked by a constant slippage (Dyer, Reference Dyer1997) between the various semantic registers of the ‘good’, which include moral as well as technical qualities (Hare, Reference Hare1952). Lana Swartz (Reference Swartz2020: 5) has observed that ‘many financial start-ups tout an attitude toward money that is ‘slow’, ‘ethical’, and rooted in ‘sharing’ and other values’. The focus on the ‘good’ also chimes with a development in broader modes of governance and their ideological legitimation that critical commentators, over the last 15 years, have described as a rhetoric of ‘ethicalization’ or ‘ethicization’ (Bogner, Torgensen, and Peissl, Reference Bogner, Torgensen and Peissl2011; Thompson, Reference Thompson2012; Bellacasa, Reference Bellacasa2017; Ege and Moser, Reference Ege and Moser2020; Ege, Reference Ege, Lange and Dietrich2022) – as part of a broader tendency towards post-politics, where a rhetoric of consensus and inevitability replaced more contentious forms of politicization (Wilson and Swyngedouw, Reference Wilson, Swyngedouw, Wilson and Swyngedouw2014).

The ‘tech-for-good’ enterprise RaiseNow was founded in Zürich 2015. It obtained a total of 5.5 million Swiss francs of start-up funding, with a subsequent addition of 12 million francs in 2025 (Roos, Reference Roos2025). Its main investors are PostFinance and SIX Group AG, the fintech holding that also owns a third of Twint AG. In the interview (T/R, 2024), RaiseNow’s CEO emphasizes that the enterprise is purpose-driven and based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, it ‘is not just about maximizing your personal profit, but also about doing good to society’. This philanthro-entrepreneurial programme resonates with the ‘solutionist worldview’ in which ‘there is a natural alignment between business opportunities and social problems’ (Nachtwey and Seidl, Reference Nachtwey and Seidl2023: 97).

Nonprofit fundraisers are presented with the two aforementioned options using Twint technology: fundraising via Twint QR codes or via the app’s marketplace. In both cases, the business model is designed to capitalize on transactions in this field by charging their nonprofit clients fees: fees for receiving payments start at 1.3% while donations cost 2%; platform fees range from 0% to 4%, depending on the plan chosen and whether one of the fee-based monthly ‘growth packages’ – which include further features, like being displayed prominently on the donations market place – is chosen and paid for. Moreover, the donations marketplace that extracts fees and data fits almost perfectly with the corporate strategy of creating a ‘walled garden’ super-app with its lock-in effect.

Twint thus benefits both symbolically and financially from its collaboration with RaiseNow. It does so through technical, economic, and discursive strategies that are typical for many fintech actors in platform capitalism. Through those strategies, they not only extract financial value, they also become powerful intermediaries.

A ‘better’ way of donating: Twint’s donation marketplace and the production of consumer-donor subjects

To better understand what donating practically means and involves in the context of Twint’s donations marketplace, we will describe its functions by taking a step-by-step tour of the interface, following an individual donor’s ‘journey’ through the app, based on the analytical walkthrough.Footnote ⁵ In doing so, we apply a ‘systematic approach to identifying cultural discourses that shape and are perpetuated by interface elements’ (Light et al., Reference Light, Burgess and Duguay2018: 888) in order to examine a site where a redistributive imaginary is being produced. Our main analytical interest is in what the Twint donation marketplace ‘does’ and what this means for redistributive imaginaries. As we will see, shaping and interpellating donor-subjects and their imaginary relations to redistributive mechanisms is a particularly important aspect of this.

A donor’s journey

On the Twint smartphone app’s standard home screen, the ‘partner functions’ on the marketplace are displayed in the center, above the four basic functions of sending money, requesting money, splitting bills and the button that leads to the QR scan camera function.

Below the small print ‘partner functions’ and ‘show all’ is a row of four icons representing different functions. A ‘show all’ button leads to more functions. ‘Donating’ appears next to other functions such as ‘parking’, ‘digital vouchers’, ‘SuperDeals’, ‘receive cash’, ‘compare subscriptions’, ‘insurance’, ‘gas 1.0’, or ‘spin & win’ (see Figure 1). Through this setup, Twint flattens the practice of donating: It is presented here initially – almost inevitably so, given the structure of the overall app – as a mundane, profane financial transaction, next to other everyday activities, free from the ideological or theological overtones which are characteristic of some analog practices of donating, such as solidarity funds or church collections.

Figure 1. Twint ‘partner functions’ with donations symbol and link to marketplace.

Source: Screenshot by authors, August 2025.

The donation symbol used here – widespread in the context of donations – is a stylized open hand and a heart that seems to be either held softly by the hand or to emerge from it, symbolizing humanitarian donations and connoting motivations such as goodwill and affection. Notably, it is not a handshake that would instead signal reciprocity and shared activity. The icon in that sense contributes to standardizing the signifiers of this practice and semantically disambiguates the latter.

On the ‘show all’ sub-page, the word ‘donating’ and the donate icon are supplemented by the description: ‘Doing a good deed can be so quick. Donate to a cause you care about.’ Here, three central themes in the discourse of digital donations make their first appearance on our journey: Speed, convenience, and personalization. Twint makes the promise, then, to accelerate and simplify, whilst also paying attention to individual preferences (‘a cause you care about’). These attributes characterize the redistributive mechanism in this imaginary.

Above the partner functions (not shown in the images here), there are ‘spotlights’ – as they are called in internal Twint terminology – tiles that highlight news and lead to selected partner functions or campaigns, including donations. Within the app, these spotlights are the means to direct the attention of the highest number of users. In emergencies such as wars or natural disasters, donation drives may become spotlights. NGOs can pay to be featured in spotlights, which means that organizations with higher budgets and name recognition are positioned advantageously here. As the Twint app is opened around two million times a day (Interview T/R, 2024), in a country of just under nine million inhabitants, the ‘spotlight’ has the potential to reach an audience that may come close to the imagined community of the nation. Twint thus curates and hierarchizes social causes, it directs attention and creates (national) publics.

After tapping the ‘donate’ button, the user is redirected to the twint.trueturn.appFootnote ⁶ that opens as a browser window within the Twint app (see Figure 2). Its aesthetic is clear and sober. On top of the screen the user sees the word ‘donating’, a search symbol and a personalizable avatar. Below that, dominating the screen visually, are tiles that highlight diverse causes, for example a photo of children in school alongside the words ‘A school desk, a better future’ and the logo of Helpcode, a charity organization. These tiles are designed to be swiped to the right or left, with whichever one is in the center becoming enlarged. Organizations and their causes are thus made accessible, whilst also being, on a technical level, equal and interchangeable, like items in a catalog.

Figure 2. Twint/TrueTurn ‘donate’ screen, with ‘helpcode’ main tile.

Source: Screenshot by authors, November 2025.

A more recent feature specifies the number of people who have donated to this organization through the Twint marketplace so far. Twint thus publicly quantifies support. Below that is the line ‘trending for you’, showing logo tiles of NGOs that are apparently popular right now (again hierarchizing organizations and causes), then ‘discover categories’: six tiles with generic-looking logos for categories of causes, that is, ‘societal’, ‘development cooperation’, ‘health’, ‘animals and environment’, ‘education’, and ‘human rights’. Twint thus orientates, classifies, and presents organizations and causes, thereby specifying some domain boundaries in this redistributive imaginary. Further down are ‘recurring donations’, ‘current hotspots’ (‘emergency aid for affected people’, currently Gaza and Ukraine) and ‘local organizations’ (with a pin symbol that indicates the user’s current location, such as Zurich). Through these options, Twint formats and encourages specific donation rhythms (which is important for many NGOs), and (once more) hierarchizes and localizes them.

Getting closer to the act of donating through this path, clicking on a tile representing an organization, users are directed to a page where they encounter a large photo image – in some cases, a ‘reel’ of moving images – whose subject indexically represents the need for donations (there are many close-ups of children of color, especially in the development aid section). The app displays the NGO’s name and logo, a short, emotive ‘claim’, and a 100-word description about their work and a ‘donate now’ button (see Figure 3). Here, Twint emotionally persuades and informs, while arguably also reinforcing stereotypes through recognizable, racialized humanitarian imagery (Shringarpure, Reference Shringarpure2018).

Figure 3. An organization’s ‘Donate now’ page.

Source: Screenshot by authors, August 2025.

Clicking on the NGO’s logo, another window opens where the user is greeted personally (‘Hello X! Thank you for supporting Y’) and, in some cases, is given the option to choose between donating once or committing to a monthly sum, which is a recently added function (see Figure 4). The user is then presented with the question, ‘How much would you like to donate?’. Three amounts are suggested (for example, CHF 30 – 80 – 140, or 5 – 75 – 175), with the middle number highlighted as the default selection. Alternatively, users can enter an amount in a field below. Some of the other functions differ between participating organizations. In a few cases, for instance, the specific act of support that can be paid for with the chosen amount is explained briefly, accompanied by icons that symbolize that action. Here, Twint personalizes, informs/concretizes, offers choices, administers payment and related information transfers, it explains, and it also nudges (towards a default option).

Figure 4. Select amount page.

Source: Screenshot by authors, August 2025.

The next screen that we encounter on our ‘donor journey’ seems more technical. It confirms the selected amount, asks for the donor’s name, email address (this is optional and depends on the NGO’s chosen fee model) and usually allows the user to request a donation receipt for tax deduction purposes. Some pages also contain a line for typing in a comment that will reach the organization. Again, Twint administers and, to a lesser extent, offers communication. In yet another step, donors are given additional options, such as subscribing to newsletters or paying additionally for Twint and RaiseNow’s service fees, so that 100% of the donation will reach the receiver. The costs that are added here vary significantly and range between about 2% and 6% – in showing these numbers, Twint professes transparency. Furthermore, there are links to data protection policy texts – and there is the donate button that then links to the generic Twint payment page known to all users. Here, one more click is required to initiate the payment procedure (Twint, obviously, both transfers and extracts money), on a screen that has a shopping cart icon at its center, standard for all payments on the app. A few seconds later, a confirmation message, with the NGO as sender address, appears in the user’s email inbox.

Inclusion in the app is reserved exclusively for nonprofit clients who pay for a RaiseNow ‘Growth Package’ – Twint thus restricts, selects, hierarchizes and filters. Overall, 180 ‘verified and trusted’ charities are available for selection on the app. Through its catalog-like design, the interface functions as a marketplace, as a medium for advertising charities and connecting to them. To appear in a ‘spotlight’ the respective NGO is required to pay an extra fee, although in emergency situations like the outbreak of Ukraine war, this fee may be waved. Push-notifications may be sent to users who have consented to receiving them (here, Twint alarms), but the company stresses its cautious use of this technology to avoid becoming connected to politically controversial positions. None of these mechanisms are obvious for users – Twint informs selectively.

Users entering the marketplace are encouraged to create an account for a more personalized user experience. It remains unclear to what extent they make use of this. The Twint CEO reports that, at this stage, the majority of donors use the QR code scan option, so between 7% and 8% of Twint’s total donations volume is generated on the app’s marketplace as described (Interview T/R, 2024). This implies that in 2023, the transaction volume on the marketplace would have been approximately 9 million Swiss francs. It is reasonable for the company to assume that this proportion will increase rapidly over the coming years – though this of course remains a business wager.

Framing ‘good’ technology: Better markets, better people, better future?

We now turn to a second site where imaginations about redistribution are being produced: the discursive framing of the donation platform’s activities as put forward by the ‘tech elites’ driving its development. For this purpose, we explicate statements from an interview by Twint’s CSO and RaiseNow’s CEO (Interview T/R, 2024) and contextualize them with insights from the platform analysis, newspaper sources, and relevant critical literature.

This will illuminate assumptions and motivations underlying the platform’s design, the consequences of which we have analyzed in the previous section. We will follow three discursive threads across these two sites: Firstly, we will refine our analysis of how redistributive mechanisms are constructed to serve irrefutable, nonpolitical goals. Secondly, we will show how the donation app’s design is informed by theories of human motivation and behavior and is made meaningful in relation to ideas about the (‘good’) donor subject. Thirdly, these threads will lead us deeper into the relational element of this redistributive imaginary, to explore how platform-enabled donating improves relations between donors, their causes and society. We will thus further interpret crucial elements of the redistributive imaginary, disambiguating what has remained somewhat vague in the ‘thinner’ data of the platform analysis.

Conclusion: The post-sovereign consumer-citizen imaginary

In this article, we empirically investigated a donations marketplace on a payment app. We used this analysis to sketch out an emergent redistributive imaginary, for which we suggest the term post-sovereign consumer-citizen imaginary. In portraying this emergent imaginary – which holds broader significance as ‘finance becomes tech’ and ‘tech does good’ – we expanded existent research on social imaginaries of financial and other economic practices and, specifically, on a ‘post-humanitarian sensibility’ that characterizes charitable giving in digital contexts.

On Twint’s donations marketplace and in the discourse co-constituting it, digital giving is represented as a form of consumption-like democratic participation in which post-sovereign consumer-citizens help ease suffering and shape society through ‘tap-donating’, assisted by platforms, which are taking a leading role in this process. By focusing on mechanisms, subjects, and relations of redistribution within this imaginary, our analysis shows how redistribution is represented and materially afforded – thereby flattening, hierarchizing, and curating societal causes – and how platforms nudge, ‘alarm’, and interpellate donor subjects as citizen-consumers. Hence, through the practices they afford, platforms seize the power to define what charitable redistribution is – its mechanisms, its imagined subjects and the social relations it generates – and how it works. Combining the analysis of the app itself with insights from an interview with key decision makers in this field, we have shown that the imaginary of redistribution emerging from this configuration is characterized by market-based ideals of efficiency, a bounded-rationality model of the human and a tech-solutionist, reductionist idea of democratic participation. Importantly, this redistributive imaginary is not only represented on the app’s semiotic surfaces and in the surrounding discourse, it becomes materially tangible, stabilized, and normalized through the everyday use of payment apps and similar technology. Ultimately, this imaginary is beneficial for platforms’ attempts to control, and extract value from, financial transactions of all kinds.

Through this analysis and the heuristic framework we have developed for it, we also refine methodological approaches for studying and comparing redistributive imaginaries more generally. The research we have presented in this article is, to our knowledge, the first socio-cultural investigation of a donations marketplace on a payment app. While it is too early to determine how many donations such in-app marketplaces will manage to attract in the future, we expect similar imaginaries to surface in related contexts and to grow in significance as digital payment forms, developed by fintech firms, continue to become entrenched in everyday life.

Furthermore, our insights confirm findings from academic writing on the ‘ethic of digital capitalism’, updating and expanding them by examining key semantic strategies and their intertwinement with technology in this context. As we were tracing the discursive and technological construction of a better ‘donor journey’, better companies, better markets, better subjects and a better future, it became evident that the socio-cultural work to construct, animate and legitimize the post-sovereign consumer-citizen redistributive imaginary invokes a constant slippage between different semantics of the ‘good’. ‘Good’ technology, then, is not only represented as being more convenient and more efficient, but also more attuned to the user’s inner authenticity, more conducive to positive feelings, more aesthetically pleasant, more contemporary and more ethical. In this context, ‘good’ is characterized by the blending of technical, aesthetic, psychological and evaluative-ethical semantics. ‘Good’, new technology is presented as inevitably shaping the future, hence determining what we call the redistributive imaginary’s vector of change. These semantics are ideologically functional for payment apps and tech-for-good more broadly, as they help establish a common sense (in the Gramscian sense of the term) in which the experientially smooth, the aesthetically pleasant, the practically convenient and the technologically new are closely tied to and even merge with – a very limited sense of – the ethico-politically good, as we have shown. Given ‘digital capitalism’s recent legitimation crisis’ (Nachtwey and Seidl, Reference Nachtwey and Seidl2023: 106) in the context of resource extractivism, monopolization, and intertwinement with authoritarian government, in the USA in particular, tech companies – especially those with monopolistic status and extractive business models – need to polish their image and spark their ‘ethical glow’. Our investigation unpacks some of the strategies through which engagement in the prosocial sector benefits the techified financial industry itself.

While our research was primarily cultural, what is under investigation here has consequences that span multiple domains. Culturally, supported by technology, the metaphor of the ‘donation market’ is turned into an infrastructural reality that is experienced and practically engaged with in everyday life. Economically, revenue streams and profits are redirected through the platform’s strategic gluing together of banks, (bank-owned) fintechs, and the nonprofit landscape. Presented as win-win-win, platformization drives dependencies and entangles ‘doing good’ more closely with finance and the payment industry. When promoting prosocial giving, these platforms are simultaneously pursuing material interests: expanding market share, capitalizing on the ‘ethical glow’ and establishing a foundation for present and future data-driven capital accumulation. Politically, it is significant that through the rise of donations platforms and payment apps, nonprofit actors become (more) dependent on quasi-monopolistic financial intermediaries’ decisions and terms of use, which enables – and, to an extent, forces – the latter to shape genuinely political decision-making-processes about who is and who is not given fundraising opportunities, where and how prominently they are featured, raising questions as to terms of use, potential favoritism, reactions to political pressure, or even censorship. Furthermore, a limited, post-political understanding of civic engagement is promoted and infrastructurally supported.

In studying fields like this, it is important to take local and national contexts into account and to not limit the analysis to the big players of Silicon Valley. Our analysis demonstrated that connecting to a positive national self-image, anchoring the platform in the local and distancing it from foreign tech behemoths, contributed to the success of the payment app that is at the center of this study. In the context of Switzerland, it was the strong and well-connected domestic banking sector that drove its development. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that our interlocutors from the tech-sector disavowed radically neoliberal or libertarian worldviews that are prominent in Silicon Valley. They stressed, for example, that they do not wish their work for the charitable sector to encroach too far into welfare state territory. While such distinctions are important, we show how tech-sector rhetoric and thinking nevertheless re-articulate and re-design the field of donations and redistribution in their own, market-oriented image – ideologically and practically, building on and fueled by the logic of platformization.

While we classify the predominant usage of the ‘good’ as ideological and question it, as we have done throughout this article, we are not suggesting that the emergence of donation platforms and donation payments through apps like Twint are, normatively speaking, simply a ‘bad’ development, either. Certainly, they have many pragmatic uses and enhance accessibility of payment for some, and they may even, at some point in the future, increase the volume of donations – or at least, importantly, they help nonprofit fundraising keep step with a world of shifting payment and financing forms and new expectations. In our research with NGOs and other civic groups, we encountered workers and activists who shared a generally positive attitude towards Twint/RaiseNow as, in spite of fees that were perceived to be high, the payment service allowed them to receive donations and other contributions with few administrative and technological hurdles. Crucially, this was also associated with the strengthening of their independence from state and foundation funding with its rules and regulations.

Our point, then, is not an overall judgment, but a critical explication of implications and consequences. In that sense, we note that the emergence and potential spread of the post-sovereign consumer-citizen imaginary of redistribution helps to legitimize the quasi-monopolistic and extractive role of for-profit financial institutions within the nonprofit landscape and contributes to building a world that conforms to the ideology of digital capitalism. Economic capitalist valorization and cultural marketization take hold at the same time. Twint’s collaboration with RaiseNow platformizes the practice of giving and thereby contributes to the ‘appleization’ not only of finance, but also of ‘doing good’. While the crucial empirical question of how people practically and affectively relate to an app such as this, and how they respond to the imaginaries produced on those sites, remained outside of this article’s remit, we argue that the spread of such infrastructures will reinforce the cultural hegemony and naturalization of market-dominated imaginaries.