ABSTRACT
The invention of a new fi nancial tool and its introduction into the commercial world may sound boring, but it is hardly that to those who are trying to do it. (Lewis 1992: xi)
INTRODUCTION-INSTRUMENTS AS THE CARRIERS OF RISK INTO MANAGEMENT
Financial institutions are highly specialised in risk management. This observation has become so taken for granted that the origins of the tools, models, and expertise being used to do the managing have largely been obscured. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the rise of calculated risk information in consumer fi nance-as in other fi nancial sectors-is not the result of any spontaneous or necessary shift brought on, for example, by the advent of digital infrastructures. As computing historian, James Cortada, has emphatically pointed out that “the most important story about computing is its applications, not its technological evolution” (2006: xi). Following this assertion, this research examines the earliest application of computing to the problem of calculating consumer credit risk. It begins from the observation that fi nancial managers cannot do their work without being equipped with specialised risk management tools. The argument is that credit managers have the ability to conceptualize and act upon particular kinds of risks because of specifi c and often commercially developed instruments whose material histories can be traced and told.
