Rebooting Amsterdam for the age of Big Tech: Platform capitalism, reintermediation, and financial-center change

The platformization of finance and the financial inroads made by tech firms large and small raises questions about the extent to which financial centers and their incumbent inhabitants retain their positions as key intermediaries in financial(ized) intermediation. Focusing on cloud adoption and digital payments in post-2008 Amsterdam, we study how and to what extent financial platformization entails the ‘rebooting’ of the Amsterdam financial center, by investigating (i) the changing composition and spatial structure of its inhabitants; (ii) the platformization of incumbent financial institutions and the rise of new intermediaries, and (iii) deepening interdependencies between financial institutions and Big Tech. We find that platform companies have come to inhabit both the city center and the Zuidas financial district at the expense of incumbent finance and other advanced producer services (APS). Along with the growing footprint of resident platform companies, typically relying on Big Tech cloud services, we identify growing interdependencies between finance and tech, as illustrated by the adoption of Big Tech cloud services among financial institutions old and new. To illuminate patterns of competition and collaboration between incumbent finance, Fintech and Big Tech, we foreground incumbent bank ING and Fintech Adyen, a payments services provider (PSP), and analyze their relations with tech giant Amazon. In the payments domain, we see new intermediaries like Adyen assume functions at the expense of incumbent APS intermediaries, including banks. In sum, we conclude that the rise of platform capitalism is progressively giving way to financial reintermediation and financial-center change, with tech companies forming an increasingly dominant sector within a platformizing para-financial APS complex, and with Big Tech assuming a growing yet uneven infrastructural role.