Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
The Doctoral School in Science and Engineering is happy to invite you to Martin BRENNECKE’s defence entitled
Decentralization and Digital Infrastructures in the Financial Sector
Supervisor: Prof Gilbert FRIDGEN
Despite the rapid evolution of financial services in recent years, many of the digital infrastructures that form the backbone of today’s financial sector are legacy systems revolving around a limited number of intermediaries. As financial markets are increasingly integrated and new asset classes emerge, so-called decentralization technologies are discussed as potential enablers for the decentralization of digital financial infrastructures.
In the design and development of services building on digital financial infrastructures, the balance between centralization and decentralization, as well as trade-offs between privacy and transparency, have emerged as key considerations for governments, organizations, and individuals alike. While acknowledging the relevance of these tensions, prior research has frequently taken predominantly social or predominantly technical perspectives in analyzing them. This arguably myopic focus has resulted in comparatively limited research taking an integrated sociotechnical lens to examine the impact of decentralization technologies on digital financial services.
To improve the sociotechnical integration of related analyses, this cumulative dissertation takes a sociotechnical perspective and makes use of a variety of research methods and designs. Depending on the research question at hand, the included publications employ established methods from information systems research, such as design science research, taxonomy development, structured literature reviews, formal modeling, qualitative content analysis, and the Delphi method. Where appropriate, they also draw on emerging approaches of computational and data-driven theory construction, using natural language processing and structured topic modeling.
As organizations and individuals increasingly recognize the relevance and potential impact of emerging decentralization technologies in critical and cross-organizational digital infrastructures, they are confronted with inherently sociotechnical challenges.
In response to these challenges, this dissertation explores the impact of technology-, organization-, and regulation-driven decentralization on individuals and organizations in the financial sector. In doing so, it makes theoretical, empirical, and artefactual contributions to information systems research that have implications for both research and domain practice.