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Abstract

This chapter explores the interactive process through which quality stabilizes in markets, based on a detailed analysis of financial selling innovations. Looking beyond fraud, it considers the case of a prudent home savings-and-loan product (the German Bausparkasse) imported to pre-crisis Hungary. Ironically, this long-term plan was later used to promote mortgages. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a bank’s sales office, the study finds that showing a financial product to clients affects quality in three ways. First, technical and personal qualities emerge and interact when the financial advisor demonstrates to the client how mass product and individual need coincide. Second, a change in the qualities of the “same” financial product involves a change in its demonstration: repositioning the plan from conservative savings to a cheaper mortgage meant shifting from hand-drawn graphs to software-generated scenarios. Third, financial advising expands the view of quality beyond products to consumers, whose qualities materialize through engagement in planning encounters with quasi experts.