Fintech for Psychological and Financial Resilience: Determinants of Financial Data Sharing Behavior for Individuals with Bipolar Disorder

Financial stability is a key challenge for individuals with bipolar disorder, a serious mental illness requiring life-long management. Symptomatic periods often lead to poor financial decision-making, including compulsive spending and risky behaviors. Widespread consumer adoption of financial technologies ("fintech") has accelerated in recent years, with numerous consumer-centric applications providing insight into personal financial behavior in exchange for access to financial data. We believe these technologies can be applied to meaningfully support individual resilience in this population and, potentially, the resilience of families and surrounding networks of care. However, little is known about this population's unique perspectives, expectations, or privacy preferences related to financial data sharing for these purposes. To this end, we deployed an online survey (N=480) to assess the privacy expectations of individuals with bipolar disorder surrounding the use of financial data as an early-warning indicator of symptoms. A factorial vignette design allowed us to vary vignette dimensions across the granularity of financial data types, context of potential data use, and recipient of data insights. This exploratory analysis demonstrates that individuals are most comfortable sharing financial data when they were the only party to receive algorithmically-generated insights, while factors such as context of use and granularity of data types were less significant. Individuals who were most willing to engage creditors or other financial technologies for assistance were significantly more willing to share with family members and clinicians.