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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Bucharest, this paper shows how mortgage brokers navigate between enforcing and subverting algorithm-based classifications, revealing shared dilemmas of discretion, legitimacy, and exclusion across state and financial bureaucracies.

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Bucharest mortgage brokerage, this presentation examines how brokers navigate the friction between algorithmic risk categories and clients’ lived economic situations. Although located outside formal state institutions, mortgage brokers act as frontline bureaucrats of financialised governance, translating heterogeneous lives into categories legible to mortgage lenders based on state infrastructures of knowledge and moral deservingness.

The paper shows how classification operates as a technique of risk translation and future governance. State baked categories such as permanent employment, self-employment, marital status, pregnancy, and disability function as moralised proxies for responsibility, stability, and attachment, while routinely failing to capture contemporary forms of labour precarity and family life. Brokers and clients collaboratively negotiate these classificatory constraints through strategic timing, narrative reframing, and legal reconfigurations, or the redistribution of property rights, revealing bureaucratic categories as unstable, inhabited, and politically consequential. By tracing how state categories circulate, harden, and are informally reworked within private credit markets, the paper highlights shared epistemic dilemmas faced by brokers and state bureaucrats alike: how to exercise discretion under audit, how to justify deviations from rigid frameworks, and how to manage the ethical discomfort of exclusions known to be arbitrary. The analysis contributes to anthropological debates on bureaucracy by extending them beyond formal state offices, showing how bureaucratic power is enacted through financial infrastructures that govern access to housing, debt, and future security.