Resumo

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a global crisis that differs from previous crises regarding its cause, scope and severity (Giacomini et al., 2021). As a result, this new scenario could influence organisations’ corporate social responsibility (CSR). In times of uncertainty, companies have the chance to show themselves in a good fashion through the alignment of social expectations and their actions. However, while the pandemic can make evident some short-term social needs, it is unclear how organisations in emerging economies are dealing with these expectations.

Traditional banks and Fintechs meet dissimilar pressures as they face opposing views from society. Due to this, did Fintechs and banks adopt different legitimation strategies during pandemic times? In which way banks and Fintechs are using social media to cope with societal expectations? Also, the pandemic could spur the use of online CSR disclosure as a legitimacy strategy for developing countries banks. Hence, the paper analysed through the Legitimacy Theory lens how traditional banks and Fintechs utilised Twitter to publish their Covid-19 related CSR actions in a developing country context.

Legitimacy theory explains the rationale behind CSR. As firms try to be seen as fulfilling society’s expectations, CSR strengthens their reputation (Panwar et al., 2014). Reputation is critical for banks due to the intangible nature of their product and their need for gaining stakeholders’ trust (Pérez et al., 2013). Yet, banks in emerging economies seem not to disclose CSR online as a legitimate strategy (Georgiadou and Nickerson, 2020). Else, Fintechs’ pose as the answer to lost trust in financial services (Bourne, 2020), exploring different ways to establish a sense of legitimacy.

The posts of 5 traditional Brazilian banks and 5 Brazilian Fintechs, containing the Portuguese word ‘pandemia’ (pandemic) and/or ‘coronavirus’ and/or the root word ‘covid’ published from March 2020 and June 2021 on Twitter were collected, totalling 4797 tweets. The analysis was built in a two-step process. Firstly, the level of interaction, virality and popularity of all the tweets were analysed. After the tweets were divided into ‘early’ and ‘late’ pandemics and grouped by banks or Fintechs, a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) analysis was carried out.

Results show that banks took advantage of COVID-19’s jolt to shift the negative image associated with them, confirming that banks are using social media to carve a better image and gain legitimacy. They also reinforce crises as opportunities for banks to change societal impressions on them. Besides, outcomes contradict that banks disregard using online CSR disclosure as a strategic tool to obtain legitimacy in emerging economies. Lastly, Fintechs appear more concerned with customer engagement and transparency, meaning online disclosing CSR during the pandemic was not their main strategy.

During the pandemic, Fintechs kept their focus on the micro relation with customers, while banks explored COVID-19 related CSR actions during the early months of the pandemic as a way of consolidating their image on a macro level. By exploring the unprecedented scenario resulting from the pandemic and investigating the differences in approach of Brazilian Fintechs and Traditional banks through the Legitimacy Theory lens, this study presented significant empirical findings that aggregate to the Legitimacy Theory as to the CSR academic literature.

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