Introduction
In recent years, financial technology (fintech) companies in Nigeria have expanded rapidly thanks to a growing youth population and rising internet access. Venture capital funding has played a significant role in this growth: Branch raised $170 million to enter the Nigerian market (Kazeem, Reference Kazeem2019) while Migo and Fair Money secured $20 million and $42 million respectively (Adeyemi, Reference Adeyemi2021; Azevedo, Reference Azevedo2019). Fintech usage intensified during the 2023 demonetisation exercise which caused cash shortages and disrupted everyday life (Jalal-Eddeen, Reference Jalal-Eddeen2025). To endure, many turned to fintech applications that offer instant, short-term loans (Adeoye, Reference Adeoye2023). Most fintech companies are headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria’s financial centre where service points provide users with some face-to-face support. In Jimeta, however, where this study is based, fintech companies operate in a markedly different context. For instance most interlocutors identified as Muslim.Footnote 1 Unlike traditional banks, fintech companies also have no physical branches in Jimeta. Their presence is entirely digital, mediated through mobile interfaces, automated processes and remote headquarters.
Fintech has often been promoted in international development as a tool for unlocking prosperity (Suri and Jack, Reference Suri and Jack2016). By digitising payments and credit, it is said to lower barriers to access and reach populations historically excluded from formal banking. Yet much of this optimism obscures the deeper transformations digital finance brings about, including the ways it reproduces colonial hierarchies and reshapes economic and political relations (Reference Langley and Rodima-TaylorLangley and Rodima-Taylor, Reference Rodima-Taylor2022). While there has been research on digital financial inclusion across Africa (e.g. Bhagat and Roderick, Reference Bhagat and Roderick2020; Donovan and Park, Reference Donovan and Park2022a, Reference Donovan and Park2022b; Maurer, Reference Maurer2012), fintech research in Nigeria remains largely limited to survey data (EFInA, 2023), institutional reports (Kama and Adigun, Reference Kama and Adigun2013) and bank-focused adoption models (Ernst and Young, 2020). One exception is Jalal-Eddeen (Reference Jalal-Eddeen2024)’s ethnographic account of everyday experiences of fintech usage in the context of algorithmic extortion. Thus there is a need, as social scientific scholars argue, to better understand the impact of fintech particularly in global south contexts (see Bernards, Reference Bernards2019; Gabor and Brooks, Reference Gabor and Brooks2017; Guermond, Reference Guermond2022; Mader, Reference Mader2018). To address this gap, this article examines how fintech operates in a specific Nigerian context where religious, spatial and infrastructural dynamics differ sharply from the assumptions embedded in mainstream fintech discourse.
Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jimeta alongside insights from credit-debt relations and infrastructure studies, this article argues that the absence of physical branches and embodied oversight in fintech does not simply limit access but actively reconfigures financial life in Nigeria. It shows that this shift toward virtual infrastructures is a productive condition that reshapes the moral, religious, and behavioural dimensions of debt. This article conceptualises a dialectic of absence and presence to capture this dynamic: the same infrastructures that appear absent in physical form remain powerfully present through algorithmic enforcement. First, the discretion afforded by digital interfaces enables Muslim users to rationalise interest-bearing loans as private, morally negotiable acts, thereby secularising financial inclusion. Second, the lack of spatial and institutional presence generates mistrust especially regarding the handling of large sums and sensitive data. Third, the same absence weakens moral accountability, as users feel less bound by obligations in the absence of face-to-face scrutiny or reputational exposure.
This article contributes to debates on digital finance and credit-debt relations by showing that infrastructural absence can be as consequential as presence in shaping financial life (cf. Maurer, Reference Maurer2012; Star and Ruhleder, Reference Star and Ruhleder1996). It introduces financial secularisation to describe how the privacy of mobile interfaces detaches borrowing from communal and religious oversight, allowing users to rationalise interest-bearing loans as personal acts justified through divine forgiveness (Kuran, Reference Kuran1995; Maurer, Reference Maurer2005; Pollard and Samers, Reference Pollard and Samers2007). The article also highlights how mistrust and coercive enforcement arise as dialectical counterparts of infrastructural absence: users embrace fintech for discretion yet remain sceptical of its legitimacy while fintech companies reassert control through algorithmic governance (Gabor and Brooks, Reference Gabor and Brooks2017; Donovan and Park, Reference Donovan and Park2022a, Reference Donovan and Park2022b; Roderick, Reference Roderick2014). In foregrounding this dialectic, the article extends socio-technical and anthropological accounts of credit-debt (Harker, Reference Harker2017, Reference Harker2020; Peebles, Reference Peebles2012) and shows how the absence of embodied oversight becomes a governing logic of digital finance in contexts of weak regulation and moral uncertainty (Bhagat and Roderick, Reference Bhagat and Roderick2020; Soederberg, Reference Soederberg2014).
The article begins with a review of literature which shows how infrastructural absence can be as productive as presence in shaping moral and relational obligations. It situates these debates within the Nigerian context, tracing how economic volatility and the legacies of financial inclusion have enabled fintech to expand into everyday life. The methodology section outlines the nine months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Jimeta and the analytical approach used to link local practices to wider political-economic structures. The results are organised around three interrelated themes: financial secularisation, mistrust and irresponsible usage. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of these dynamics for understanding how infrastructural absence governs debt and consumption in contexts of weak state authority.
Infrastructural absence, moral obligation, and the reconfiguration of debt
Infrastructures are often assumed to be material artefacts such as cables, roads, or bank branches. Yet social scientific work stresses that they should instead be understood as socio-technical systems that organise everyday life (Star, Reference Star1999; Star and Ruhleder, Reference Star and Ruhleder1996). They are relational, embedded in practices and often taken for granted until they fail. Finance similarly depends on infrastructural arrangements which combine physical artefacts, standards and routines (Maurer, Reference Maurer2012). Studies of remittances make a similar point: for instance Rodima-Taylor and Grimes (Reference Rodima-Taylor and Grimes2019a, Reference Rodima-Taylor and Grimes2019b) highlight how global payment rails are embedded in local practices, shaping how obligations are enacted. These systems shape not only what is technically possible (Robins, Reference Robins2025), but also how people interpret their own obligations (Guermond, Reference Guermond2022). When physical infrastructures fail or disappear, their effects become even more visible.
Recent scholarship has taken up this issue directly by showing how absence can be as consequential as presence. For instance Harker (Reference Harker2017, Reference Harker2020) conceptualises debt through the entanglement of ‘topological binds’ and ‘topographic spaces’ – i.e. financial ties stretched across distance but anchored in specific geographies such as branches or offices that structure accountability. When such anchors are missing, the binds do not dissolve but accountability is reconfigured. In this sense, the absence of physical infrastructures – and the rise of virtual infrastructures – reshapes how debt relations are lived and enforced. Peebles (Reference Peebles2012) similarly shows how debt relies on spatial geographies, from prisons to leg-bailing, to secure repayment. Taken together, these perspectives highlight that debt obligations are anchored across both social and physical terrain (Harker and Kirwan, Reference Harker and Kirwan2019). Building on this, this article will later highlight that the absence of branches in Jimeta produces distinctive financial ecologies that intertwine with moral and social frameworks.
If infrastructures underpin finance, debt is the relational practice most shaped by them. Debt has long been understood as more than an economic transaction. Graeber (Reference Graeber2011) shows that debt is fundamentally moral, binding people through obligation and hierarchy. Lazzarato (Reference Lazzarato2012: 7) describes a contemporary ‘debt economy’ in which ‘everyone is… accountable to and guilty before capital’, emphasising how obligations are embedded in power relations. Roberts (Reference Roberts2012, Reference Roberts2014) extends this argument by showing that debt operates as a mechanism for financing social reproduction and deepening gendered insecurity. This is even more prominent within domestic spaces (Harker et al., Reference Harker, Sayyad and Shebeitah2019) and can be affectively charged (Anderson et al., Reference Anderson, Langley, Ash and Gordon2020). Yet Eagleton (Reference Eagleton2011) argues that in contexts such as Nigeria, wage labour predominates and debt intersects with precarious livelihoods. Religious frameworks add further weight. In Islam, charging interest (riba) is explicitly forbidden and seen as exploitative (Kuran, Reference Kuran1995; Pollard and Samers, Reference Pollard and Samers2007). Debt is nonetheless a serious ethical and spiritual duty: a Hadith states that the soul of the believer is ‘held hostage’ by unpaid debts.Footnote 2 Islamic finance instruments such as murabahah, musharakah and sukuk reconcile modern loans with sharia principles (El-Gamal, Reference El-Gamal2006; Iqbal and Molyneux, Reference Iqbal and Molyneux2005).Footnote 3 Everyday studies also show how Muslims navigate tensions between faith and financial need, often using pragmatic strategies to reconcile borrowing with moral ideals (Maurer, Reference Maurer2005; Rudnyckyj, Reference Rudnyckyj2019).
Taken together, these insights suggest that the replacement of physical with virtual infrastructures disrupts moral and social logics of debt. By removing face-to-face scrutiny and local institutional presence, fintech applications create conditions in which users rationalise interest-bearing loans as private transactions, shielded from communal or religious sanction. I conceptualise this process as financial secularisation. Financial secularisation not only detaches borrowing from visible religious oversight and collective accountability but allows individuals to frame it as a personal matter that is justified through appeals to divine forgiveness. As this article will later show, many interlocutors in Jimeta described using digital loans discreetly, emphasising privacy and expediency. These practices also illustrate how branchless fintech enables users to navigate obligations in ways that are both pragmatic and morally complex. Infrastructural absence thus interacts with relational and religious frameworks to produce new financial ecologies. It shapes how debt is perceived, negotiated and enacted.
If moral obligation is central to debt, trust is the condition that sustains it. Anthropological work in specific African contexts shows that debt relations often rest on forms of trust and negotiated reciprocity, though the forms this takes vary across regions. For example, Shipton (Reference Shipton2007, Reference Shipton2011) highlights the moral significance of debt among the Luo in Kenya while Clark (Reference Clark1994) documents how Ghanaian market women rely on reputation in susu lending. These studies illuminate the social embeddedness of loans in particular settings. However, they should not be read as uniform ‘African’ logics of borrowing. As this article will show, debt relations in Jimeta combine contractual obligations, kinship ties and Islamic moral frameworks thus producing hybrid practices that differ from both East and West African examples. Digital credit or what Langley and Leyshon (Reference Langley and Leyshon2022) call ‘poverty credit’ complicates these dynamics. Indeed, in different parts of Africa, fintech allows users to transfer money and obtain loans in just a few taps (Akolgo, Reference Akolgo2023; Reference Langley and Rodima-TaylorLangley and Rodima-Taylor, Reference Rodima-Taylor2022). In this shift, trust no longer rests on kinship or reputation but increasingly on algorithmic decisions and interface affordances (Ash et al., Reference Ash, Anderson, Gordon and Langley2018). Because those affordances are less negotiable and operate at scale, users have fewer local avenues to contest adverse decisions. These arrangements create uncertainties that shape how obligations are perceived and managed, particularly when accountability is no longer enforced face-to-face.
The absence of embodied presence reshapes accountability. Classical accounts stress debt’s capacity to govern conduct by instilling guilt, duty, and responsibility (Lazzarato, Reference Lazzarato2012). In many African contexts, repayment is enforced through social sanction, reputation, and community standing (Clark, Reference Clark1994; Shipton, Reference Shipton2011); these mechanisms weaken when debt is mediated solely through mobile interfaces. Fintech loans in Jimeta, as this article will highlight, embody these dynamics. Yet platforms retain power: through opaque algorithmic processes that extract the behavioural data of users for legibility purposes (Bernards, Reference Bernards2019; Gabor and Brooks, Reference Gabor and Brooks2017; Langevin, Reference Langevin2019), fintech companies reintroduce coercion digitally (Donovan and Park, Reference Donovan and Park2022a). These dynamics are not neutral. As Roderick (Reference Roderick2014) notes, commodification of personal data enables neoliberal financial infrastructures to discipline consumers by embedding surveillance within the mechanisms of debt. Such (exclusionary) practices are often racialised, reinforcing the inequities built into financial infrastructures (Bhagat, Reference Bhagat2020; Bhagat and Roderick, Reference Bhagat and Roderick2020; Černušáková, Reference Černušáková2025). These dynamics reproduce moral surveillance in virtual form but do not restore trust. Fintech thus operates through a contradictory regime: the absence of physical branches and embodied presence weakens moral obligation while hyper-visible digital enforcement reinstates coercion. This dialectic of absence and presence, as this article will argue, is central to understanding branchless finance.
In summary, this literature review demonstrates that debt is relational, moral, and spatially embedded. Infrastructural arrangements – both their presence and absence – shape how obligations are perceived, negotiated, and enforced while trust, social norms, and religious frameworks mediate these dynamics. Digital lending and branchless fintech transform these conditions by producing a dialectic of infrastructural absence and hyper-visible digital enforcement. This review provides the conceptual and empirical lens for analysing these transformations in Jimeta, Nigeria by highlighting the significance of financial secularisation, mistrust, and digitally mediated accountability. The following section situates these issues within the political-economic and historical context of Jimeta and the wider Nigeria thus setting the stage for the discussion of empirical findings.
Nigeria, regulation, and fintech lending
Nigeria, situated in West Africa with a population of over 206 million, is the most populous country on the African continent (World Bank, 2023). Between 2010 and 2020, Nigeria held the position of the largest economy (World Bank, 2015) and leading crude oil producer in Africa (Trading Economics, Reference Economicsn.d.). In 2011, crude oil accounted for approximately 15.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). Nigeria’s financial system also presents a paradox. On the one hand, it is characterised by strong regulation in the banking sector and sustained efforts to promote financial inclusion. The country is home to some of the biggest and most influential banks in West Africa. Access Bank, for instance, held total assets worth approximately $33.4 billion as of 2023 (Minney, Reference Minney2023). In 2025, banks were instructed to recapitalise in order to strengthen consumer confidence in the financial system (CBN, 2025). These developments reflect years of financial inclusion efforts that began in the late 1970s as well as a series of reforms in the 1980s to the 2000s (Lewis, Reference Lewis1994; Uche, Reference Uche2000). The reforms in the early 2000s included banking consolidation and the launch of a microfinance policy to target the poor (Kama and Adigun, Reference Kama and Adigun2013).
On the other hand, despite reforms such as the cashless policy that accelerated the adoption of electronic channels in the financial sector and laid the groundwork for the expansion of fintech (Kama and Adigun, Reference Kama and Adigun2013), there remains weak enforcement and limited consumer protection especially in relation to fintech lending. This confusion is exacerbated by uncertainty about which agency is responsible for regulating digital lending – is it the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) or the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC)? Regardless, many fintech companies have been sanctioned for predatory practices including excessive interest rates (Dosunmu, Reference Dosunmu2021). In many cases, this has led to widespread loan defaults. As a result, fintech firms have resorted to using sensitive user data to intimidate or shame defaulters (Jalal-Eddeen, Reference Jalal-Eddeen2024). Weak legal enforcement compounds the problem; cases, especially those involving debt recovery, are lengthy and rarely yield tangible results (Oko, Reference Oko2005; Osasona, Reference Osasona2015). Credit bureaus also have shallow coverage compared to those in North America or Europe due to a lack of reliable data and the inability to share timely information among financial institutions. Default therefore carries no long-term penalty on a user’s credit score.
Despite high default rates, fintech companies remain profitable through short-term, high-interest lending and rapid loan recycling. By targeting users facing urgent liquidity needs, they offset losses from non-repayment. These dynamics of debt dependence are inseparable from Nigeria’s broader economic pressures. Since the 1980s, when the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was introduced, living standards have declined, informal employment has expanded and everyday precarity has deepened (Sethuraman, Reference Sethuraman1981).Footnote 4 The People’s Bank was created in 1989 to provide loans to individuals and enterprises operating in the informal sector (Meagher and Yunusa, Reference Meagher and Yunusa1996). In more recent years, the 2015 plunge in oil prices (OPEC, n.d.), together with President Buhari’s protectionist policies between 2015 and 2023 – including the closure of land borders (Campbell, Reference Campbell2019) – led to high inflation and job losses. The abrupt demonetisation exercise of 2022/2023 which led to Naira commodification and disrupted everyday life exacerbated these challenges (Jalal-Eddeen, Reference Jalal-Eddeen2025). These developments have eroded public trust in state institutions and entrenched reliance on fintech loans for daily survival (see Adeoye, Reference Adeoye2023; SBM, 2023). This tendency reflects what Soederberg (Reference Soederberg2014) calls the debtfare state wherein governments facilitate the expansion of private credit as a substitute for social welfare, encouraging citizens to depend on debt to manage daily precarity.
To understand the disruptive effect of fintech, it is important to recognise the borrowing practices it displaced. Before the emergence of fintech, access to credit around the area now known as Jimeta-Yola, especially in (pre-)colonial times, largely took the form of kinship-based lending and rotating savings groups (adashe) (Abba, Reference Abba2003). In later years, with the advent of microfinance policy in the early 2000s, microfinance institutions (MFIs) expanded into the area (Rakshit and Mendi, Reference Rakshit and Mehdi2021) although evidence shows they enable finance-led capitalism instead of improving livelihoods (see Soederberg, Reference Soederberg2013).Footnote 5 Thus people in Jimeta accessed credit through a mix of informal and semi-formal mechanisms. Most of these arrangements carried moral weight – repayment was treated as both an economic duty and a religious obligation given the prohibition of riba in Islam and the emphasis on trust and reputation. Terms were often flexible and negotiated within networks of kinship or community standing. As Rodima-Taylor (Reference Rodima-Taylor2022) observes, such local institutions for mediating credit and debt in African communities remain anchored in interpersonal obligations and exchange networks. By contrast, fintech introduced impersonal, interest-bearing loans mediated through mobile interfaces. Unlike in cities such as Lagos where established branch networks and stronger infrastructural support underpin fintech operations, fintech users in Jimeta engage with these applications amid infrastructural absence and limited institutional presence. This shift ultimately means that debt is reconfigured as a private, individualised transaction, often rationalised outside communal or religious oversight.
In summary, Jimeta exemplifies how financialisation operates through both structural and everyday dynamics. The state’s weak enforcement capacity and persistent economic volatility shape the conditions under which fintech companies operate, while historical practices of cooperative and kinship lending continue to influence how users interpret and negotiate these new forms of credit. It is this intersection of structural absence and everyday adaptation that provides the backdrop for the findings that follow.
Methodology
This article draws on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jimeta, conducted between January and September 2023. Ethnography involves long-term, situated engagement with people’s everyday lives to understand their values, behaviours and beliefs (Harris, Reference Harris1968). The aim here was not statistical generalisability but contextual depth: to show how fintech is adopted and used in a particular place. Ethnography was also chosen because it links local practices to wider structures such as colonialism and capitalism (Weiss, Reference Weiss, Mader, Mertens and Van Der Zwan2020). Recent studies demonstrate how ethnography can illuminate how financial practices emerge in societies at the margins of the global economy, shaped by multilateral institutions (Bear, Reference Bear2015; Elyachar, Reference Elyachar2005; Shipton, Reference Shipton2009), national governments (James, Reference James2015), and financial markets (Zaloom, Reference Zaloom2006).
Jimeta is the commercial hub and administrative capital of Adamawa State. As of 2022, Adamawa had an estimated population of 4.9 million (NPC, 2022) with Jimeta projected at around 250,000 in 2013 (ASPC, 2013). The region has faced prolonged insecurity from Boko Haram. Jimeta’s population is ethnically diverse and consists of Fulbe, Hausa, Verre, and Batta groups (Abba, Reference Abba2003). There also exists Christians, Muslims, and traditional worshippers. However Islam predominates in the area where this research was conducted. The city is also socially conservative (see Dudley, Reference Dudley1967 on conservatism in northern Nigeria) which shaped both the context of borrowing and my access to interlocutors.
Primary data consisted of 28 semi-structured interviews with fintech users recruited through snowball sampling. These included 25 men and 3 women of different age groups. Most interlocutors were working-class or poor and operating within the informal economy. They were keke drivers, petty traders, tailors, mechanics, street vendors, and market stall operators whose economic lives were defined by irregular earnings and seasonal trade. A minority came from middle-class backgrounds. For instance, Tani, a recent university graduate, lived in his father’s house in Dougirei, a well-planned, exclusive neighbourhood on the hilly outskirts of Jimeta. Religious and cultural norms constrained my access to women interlocutors. Research shows that women in Nigeria often conceal indebtedness due to shame and fear of stigma (Olayiwola, Reference Olayiwola and Wood2021; Olohunlana et al., Reference Olohunlana, Shittu, Adeosun, Popogbe and Olohunlana2024).
Interviews lasted between 30 and 60 minutes and respondents were asked questions regarding fintech usage, reasons for borrowing and consequences of default. Most loans were used for immediate consumption needs such as school fees, medical expenses, and food, with a smaller share for business purposes. Most interlocutors identified as Muslim, yet many still borrowed from fintech applications, rationalising their decisions in ways discussed in the findings. Although the number of formal interviews was modest due to security concerns and the need for trust-based access, these were complemented by informal interviews with six fintech industry executives and CEOs, digital ethnography, and extended periods of participant observation. Following Creswell and Poth (Reference Creswell and Poth2016), I adopted the role of a ‘complete participant’, actively engaging in the same spaces as those I was observing.
Data analysis followed an abductive logic of moving back and forth between theory and field material – what Cerwonka and Malkki (Reference Cerwonka and Malkki2008) term ‘tacking’. Ethnographic findings were supplemented with statistical data and online material to situate borrowing practices in broader claims about fintech usage in Nigeria. All data was pseudonymised, transcribed, and coded using NVivo. Ethical safeguards were strictly adhered to throughout the research process.
Fintech and the reconfiguration of financial life in Jimeta, Nigeria
This section examines three interconnected ways in which the absence of physical branches and the reliance on virtual infrastructures reshapes financial life in Jimeta. Drawing on user experiences, it focuses on how these dynamics reconfigure religious, relational, and behavioural dimensions of collecting loans. First, I explore how the lack of physical scrutiny enables a form of financial secularisation. Second, I analyse how the absence of recourse and the opacity of digital governance generate mistrust. Third, I show how these dynamics culminate in irresponsible borrowing where weakened accountability is countered by coercive digital enforcement.
Financial secularisation and the absence of embodied oversight
In Jimeta, many Muslim interlocutors described how they had become comfortable using fintech loans even though interest is explicity prohibited in Islamic law (Pollard and Samers, Reference Pollard and Samers2007). What made this possible, they explained, was the absence of physical institutions and the discretion that digital borrowing provided. Fintech companies in Nigeria are typically new and operate without branches, relying instead on mobile interfaces. This lack of embodied oversight allows users to rationalise loans as private transactions, separate from communal or religious scrutiny. In the words of Ahmed, a civil servant in Jimeta:
With fintech, just like I told you, your image is your collateral. So you can just decide, okay, I want a loan and that is it, you just get your quick loan with interest… I mean the interest is haram from an Islamic point of view, but would you rather go and queue up in the halls of a bank and suffer or would rather get the loan quickly using your app? (Interview with Ahmed, 27 February 2023)
For Ahmed, the everyday hardship of formal banking outweighed concerns about religious prohibition. Fintech loans were easier and more discreet: no queues, no documentation, and no risk of being seen by peers. This highlights how the shift from physical to virtual infrastructures reshapes the moral economy of debt. Communal negotiation is replaced by algorithmic approval and religious accountability is muted by technical expediency. Here, we also begin to see what Star and Ruhleder (Reference Star and Ruhleder1996) call the paradox of infrastructure: it manifests as that which enables action while remaining out of view.
The design of fintech reinforces this dynamic. For instance, Audu, an unemployed youth in Jimeta, emphasised the simplicity of interfaces: ‘It is the easiest to use ever. Like it is so fast and straightforward… The design is also awesome’ (Interview with Audu, 15 February 2023). Interfaces cluster services into labelled icons for loans, transfers, bills, and airtime. This ease of use reduces friction and encourages repeat borrowing. This is not surprising as social scientific literature has shown that simplicity in interface design as well as intuitive navigation enhance user satisfaction and increase transaction frequency (Ash et al., Reference Ash, Anderson, Gordon and Langley2018). Thus in Jimeta, this usability supports the normalisation of interest-bearing loans despite religious prohibitions.
Some fintech users were self-conscious about this contradiction but justified their actions by citing a lack of alternatives and through appeals to God for forgiveness. Take the case of Adam, a commodity trader in Jimeta:
Yeah, actually, even the last loan I told you I have the 10,000 outstanding, I think about the interest, like how it was preached, it is not good, and the rest. But I usually console myself, that I collect this loan because there are no halal loan apps that will offer me these loans… and I will ask God for forgiveness. (Interview with Adam, 14 April 2023)
As Kuran (Reference Kuran1995) and El-Gamal (Reference El-Gamal2006) note, Islamic frameworks treat not just repayment but the nature of the transaction itself as moral terrain. Adam’s reflection shows how fintech loans create a tension between Islamic prohibitions on interest (riba) and the practical need for cash. They allow fintech users to manage this conflict privately thus reframing borrowing as a necessary deviation rather than a deliberate sin.
In contrast, Demilade, a fintech company CEO in Lagos, argued that northern users largely avoided fintech because of Islamic prohibitions:
So interestingly, there’s actually a lot of activities in the north, right. Even in our mobile app, we have a lot of engagement from northern Nigeria. I think they actually do trust the apps. I think the only challenge is this concept of Islamic banking, where there is riba, halal and all those things. So some of them don’t want to get close to many of these apps because they see all these things as haram. (Interview with Demilade, 09 May 2023)
This view, however, oversimplifies local realities. In Jimeta, financial need often overrides adherence to religious prohibitions, with many fintech users reconciling their actions through lack of alternatives and appeals to forgiveness. As Maurer (Reference Maurer2005) reminds us, debt practices are rarely absolute; they are hybrid, locally negotiated, and entangled with kinship, religion, and institutional infrastructures. What Demilade casts as straightforward avoidance is, on the ground, a complex negotiation where fintech users mobilise both Islamic norms and pragmatic justifications.
This disconnect highlights how external perceptions, like those from Demilade, oversimplify the complexities of everyday life in the north. Such stereotypes are also perpetuated online and in the media by individuals in places like Lagos, south-west Nigeria. They position northern Muslims as reluctant modern subjects whose religious conservatism hinders progress. This framing resonates with what Bhagat and Roderick (Reference Bhagat and Roderick2020) term racialised inclusion – the process through which digital finance reproduces hierarchies of cultural difference, casting some groups as less modern or creditworthy and therefore in need of technological correction. In this sense, regional and moral hierarchies become mapped onto technological ones, legitimising unequal forms of participation in digital finance systems.
In summary, in this section, the absence of branches and the privacy of mobile interfaces allow fintech borrowing to be framed as a discreet, individual act rather than a communal or religious transgression. This process of financial secularisation does not mean religion ceases to matter. Instead, infrastructural absence detaches borrowing from embodied oversight, shifting it into a private moral domain. This resonates with Graeber (Reference Graeber2011)’s insistence that debt is always moral, but shows how, in digitally mediated contexts, that morality is reconfigured rather than erased.
Mistrust and the limits of digital recourse
Building on the previous discussion of financial secularisation, this section examines how the absence of embodied presence and opacity of digital governance shape mistrust of fintech in Jimeta. While applications offer loans, savings, and transfer services, many interlocutors were reluctant to entrust them with large sums of money.
First, mistrust arose because fintech lacked branches or staff for complaints. According to Puppi, an interior decorator:
There is limitations of the money I used to save on there, because even though they say that it’s very reliable and trusted, I can’t use it because they don’t have branches here. So when something happens, I can’t complain there or something. Because whatever we used to do, we do it online. So I don’t know when my complaint is going to be answered or something else. That’s why I use to put a small amount of money there so that I can use it for my daily activities. (Interview with Puppi, 23 March 2023)
Puppi’s statement highlights a paradox. Despite claims of reliability, the absence of a physical location for recourse instilled a sense of uncertainty. He therefore restricted fintech usage to minor daily transactions and reserved trust for banks. This reflects a broader pattern in northern Nigeria where people continue to prefer embodied transactions at bank branches. What this suggests is not a contradiction but a tension at the heart of fintech adoption. On one hand, users embrace fintech applications for their speed and discretion which makes them attractive for small loans or daily transactions. On the other hand, the very absence of branches and human recourse makes people reluctant to trust fintech with larger sums or savings. This dialectic – enthusiastic uptake for certain functions and hesitation for others – defines the way fintech is woven into financial life in Jimeta, operating at the intersection of formal institutions and informal practices (Rodima-Taylor, Reference Rodima-Taylor2022).
Second, the state has also reinforced mistrust. In 2024, the Nigerian government alleged that ‘crypto traders were leveraging fintech platforms to disrupt the foreign exchange (FX) market’ (Olowogboyega, Reference Olowogboyega2024). Using this claim, it temporarily halted new customer onboarding on several fintech applications and banned Binance, a cryptocurrency platform. The government further demanded access to user data (Oladunmade, Reference Oladunmade2024). While aimed at stabilising the naira, these interventions created uncertainty for users and damaged the reputational legitimacy of fintech companies. These interventions also highlight how state power and financial infrastructures are entangled. As Soederberg (Reference Soederberg2014) argues in her work on the debtfare state, financial access is mediated by state regulatory frameworks that can enable and constrain access to credit. In Nigeria, regulatory volatility not only generates precarity – and by extension reliance on digital loans as seen during demonetisation – but also feeds mistrust. It reminds users that fintech is not merely a technical platform but part of a contested political economy.
This structural volatility intersects with everyday experiences of fraud and design flaws thereby producing a fragmented fintech ecosystem. Concerns were heightened by the proliferation of fraudulent applications. Chun, a recent graduate, recalled:
I once downloaded an app. I filled in my details and everything. So upon requesting the money, they asked me to upload my credit card details. I uploaded. So they removed I think was it 50 or 100 Naira from my card. They didn’t give me the money. And so after some days, I looked up the name of the company online and I saw that it was fake. (Interview with Chun, 21 March 2023)
The contrast between Audu’s enthusiasm for simple design and Chun’s suspicion of a poorly built interface illustrates the fragmented nature of the fintech ecosystem in Nigeria. Well-designed apps encourage repeated engagement while fraudulent or badly designed ones feed mistrust. Both realities coexist and shape how people navigate digital finance. This shows that adoption and suspicion are not mutually exclusive but intertwined.
Such experiences circulated on social media. For instance @iamrildwanbello (2023) tweeted that ‘I am afraid Yahoo boys are now building apps and providing basic services like bill payment etc. Just be careful where you sign up with your biodata and input card details. Stay Safe, don’t go and hand over your data to a shark’. Even though many licensed fintech companies displayed the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) insurance seal as a marker of genuineness, users continued to associate digital-only platforms with fraud.
What is striking is that many interlocutors also mistrusted banks for being insecure but nonetheless considered them more reliable than fintech. As Tani explained:
These banks are not reliable at all. Still I think I will deposit in my bank account sadly. Because you can complain – a human being believes in what they can see, what you can touch, physical banks (interview with Tani, 22 March 2023).
Olamide, a fintech CEO, offered a similar view:
It is a matter of human connection, it is a matter of physicality as tangibility. The average fintech or digital bank user wants tangibility. I can’t go into an office one day and jack up my account officers and say come here, where’s my money. Do you understand? And so it’s not really a Nigerian thing. It’s just the way we perceive tangibility as a people in the in the world. So what’s happening is many fintech are actually looking to open a bank branch. (interview with Olamide, 28 April 2023)
This preference for tangibility echoes what Harker (Reference Harker2020) describes as the ‘topological bind’ of debt or in this case how spatial arrangements underpin the formation of (financial) trust. In Jimeta, the ability to locate and confront an institution provides moral reassurance that abstract applications cannot offer.
Mistrust also extended to data practices. Onboarding required new fintech users to provide sensitive information including a National Identification Number (NIN), a Bank Verification Number (BVN), selfies and, in some cases, access to phone contacts, messages, calendar, and WhatsApp accounts (fieldnotes, 07 April 2023). While fintech companies justified this as a way to determine user legibility (Bernards, Reference Bernards2019; Donovan and Park, Reference Donovan and Park2022a), many interlocutors interpreted it as exploitative data extraction (Roderick, Reference Roderick2014). Demilade, a fintech CEO, openly described how user data was financialised:
Apart from gathering data from users for loan approvals, we also integrate it into broader business models. Here in our company, in fact we use some of this data to build other products. We were able to understand the spending habits of users and that was how we introduced loans… Now through loans, we have been able to train our models and are planning to introduce a new product soon that I cannot tell you yet but watch out… (Interview with Demilade, 09 May 2023)
Such practices illustrate what Aitken (Reference Aitken2017) describes as the ‘acts of configuration’ through which objects, practices, or bodies are transformed into financial assets or sources of financial value. For fintech users however, they reinforced suspicion that these applications were less about serving people and more about commodifying them.
In short, mistrust in Jimeta emerged from a dialectic of absence and presence. The absence of branches and embodied recourse made fintech feel intangible and unreliable, while the opaque presence of digital data extraction and weak regulation undermined its legitimacy. This combination left users cautious, engaging only minimally with fintech and reinforcing the enduring appeal of banks despite their flaws.
Irresponsible borrowing and coercive enforcement
This section begins with an excerpt from a conversation with Iya, a student in Jimeta, whose experience illustrates how the absence of physical institutions shapes repayment behaviour.
Shuaib: Have you ever defaulted?
Iya: Yes.
Shuaib: How many times?
Iya: A lot *laughter*
Shuaib: Okay, what led to you defaulting? Was it deliberate or it wasn’t?
Iya: I think, okay. There are some that were deliberate… You feel like… okay this just brings me back to the issue I spoke about fintech not having physical branches. Okay. I feel like okay, there’s a barrier between me and you okay? I’m on the other side of the screen and you are on the other side of the screen. I feel like, okay, there’s nothing you can really do if I ever decide not to pay. So there’s that curiosity at the end of the day to see like, Okay if I do not pay what will happen? And nothing happens.
Shuaib: So in other words, the lack of branches is a disadvantage you would say?
Iya: It is a huge one. Very huge. Between you and the customer, there has to be like a relationship. You have to see your customer, you have to know what your customer is thinking, you have to know what your customer needs. (Interview with Iya, 09 April 2023).
Iya’s remarks show how the absence of embodied oversight can weaken repayment discipline. Being separated from lenders by a screen created a perception of impunity: that defaulting would not trigger meaningful consequences. In contrast with traditional microfinance schemes, where repayment was enforced through community ties and reputational sanction (Clark, Reference Clark1994; Shipton, Reference Shipton2011), fintech’s branchless model strips borrowing of these relational checks. What remains is an impersonal interaction that fintech users interpret as low-risk, encouraging experimentation with default.
This was reinforced by another user, Faruk, a small business owner in Jimeta, who described fintech loans as ‘palliatives’. While the term usually refers to temporary relief, in Nigeria it has come to signify free resources to be exploited rather than obligations to be honoured. This understanding stems from the Nigerian government’s use of the term to describe its COVID-19 relief packages which were framed as temporary support that did not require repayment (Eranga, Reference Eranga2020). For Faruk, calling fintech loans palliatives implied that they were a form of support to be consumed rather than obligations to be honoured.
While these strategies may appear rational from users’ perspective, they mark a departure from the moral subjectivity that Lazzarato (Reference Lazzarato2012) describes where debt functions as a technology of control by producing feelings of guilt, duty, and responsibility. In his view, the debtor-creditor relationship compels individuals to present themselves as trustworthy subjects until their obligations are fulfilled. Yet for users like Iya and Faruk, the absence of tangible enforcement or social proximity undermined this moral dynamic. Iya’s refusal to honour repayment is framed as curiosity about the limits of enforcement while Faruk’s description of loans as palliatives implied an expectation of relief without accountability. Both cases illustrate how the absence of face-to-face oversight has weakened the power of debt to govern behaviour, disrupting the moral economies on which repayment once relied.
Yet the weakening of moral obligation does not mean that users face no consequences. Some fintech companies adopted threats as a disciplinary technique. By threats, I mean the expression of intent to punish fintech users due to their inability to pay back loans. Mohammed, a fintech user and product designer in Jimeta, explained how these companies use social pressure to enforce compliance:
They instil fear because let’s assume I go on Soko Loan and I apply for a loan of 5000 and then I default payment. They will call or send me a message… like a warning, telling me that they will contact people from my contacts on my phone. They will send messages to these people telling them that I have defaulted on payment. So automatically I wouldn’t want to tarnish my image. Like I wouldn’t want to my parents or my girlfriend or my friends or family getting a message from Soko Loan, saying that I applied for so so so and haven’t paid back and all of that. So I’ll try… I’ll push myself to pay back the loan before they embarrass me (Interview with Mohammed, 23 February 2023)
These tactics aim to provoke fear of social shaming. As Anderson et al. (Reference Anderson, Langley, Ash and Gordon2020) have argued, apparatuses of credit-debt can sometimes activate and mobilise affective attachments that can damage the capacity to inhibit a desired form of life. Yet instead of compliance, they often generate resistance as users begin to call fintech companies’ bluff (Reference Jalal-EddeenJalal-Eddeen, forthcoming). Here also, the power of digital governance becomes evident as technology is used to monitor, regulate, and enforce repayment (Gabor and Brooks, Reference Gabor and Brooks2017; Roderick, Reference Roderick2014). Contact data is accessed and retrieved from the device of a fintech user – presumably through permissions given during onboarding as discussed in the previous section – to leverage social relations as a form of enforcement.
This can also take a gendered dimension (Roberts, Reference Roberts2014). For instance Laila, a female interlocutor told me how fintech companies edited her photos with captions labelling her as ‘HIV positive’. This tactic was not reported by any male fintech user I spoke to.
I had to start using a face mask to cover my face for like a while… Why would they be spreading rumours about me, especially that I have HIV while it is false? (interview with Laila, 05 May 2023).
Seen in this light, fintech companies are not merely providing loans but also weaponising user data in ways that exploit personal networks. This reintroduces, in aggressive form, the spatial and social enforcement that Peebles (Reference Peebles2012) describes in his account of jurisdictional control and debtors’ prisons – except here, enforcement is virtual. Fintech simulates (digital) presence through data access, extracting social proximity by weaponising contact lists. In doing so, it paradoxically recreates moral surveillance without restoring trust or relational accountability. The result is a form of digital extortion. And because the inner workings of these processes remain opaque, the asymmetry between fintech companies and fintech users is further reinforced.
Conclusion
This article has shown that the absence of physical branches and the reliance on virtual infrastructures has ambivalent effects on everyday financial life in Jimeta, Nigeria. Through ethnographic analysis, it argues that this reconfiguration of infrastructure – from physical to virtual – shapes how people engage with credit, negotiate religious norms, and reason about obligation and trust. Fintech applications enable discreet access to loans in a religiously conservative context yet erode the social and spatial foundations of accountability. The appeal of fintech for some users lies in its ability to bypass religious and reputational scrutiny. Yet this same detachment erodes trust, fosters default, and undermines repayment discipline. Rather than eliminating intermediaries, fintech replaces social relationships with opaque systems of algorithmic governance and data extraction. This creates a moral vacuum in which users navigate borrowing as a private, unregulated, and often exploitative terrain.
Empirically, the article contributes to current debates by showing how everyday users interpret and respond to infrastructural absence. In Jimeta, fintech loans are used for short-term needs such as food, school fees, and medical bills but rarely trusted with larger sums or savings. This selective pattern demonstrates that financial inclusion is not wholesale adoption but contingent and partial. What is often celebrated as seamless inclusion, in practice, generates not only technical but moral and relational friction. By foregrounding the voices of users in this specific context, the article provides a grounded account of how financial infrastructures work on the margins: not through formal policies alone but through moral reasoning, ethical calculations, and institutional improvisation.
The article extends debates in international political economy and economic geography by showing that branchless fintech constitutes a new mode of governing debt and consumption under contemporary capitalism. In contexts of weak regulation, fintech companies substitute for public authority by mediating access, enforcing repayment, and extracting data, thereby deepening the privatisation of social governance (Bernards, Reference Bernards2019; Soederberg, Reference Soederberg2014). This dynamic resonates with Gabor and Brooks (Reference Gabor and Brooks2017)’s notion of the fintech-philanthropy-development complex wherein digital finance initiatives integrate behavioural economics and predictive algorithms to monitor and monetise the digital footprints of the poor. They show that such systems extend financialisation by transforming inclusion into a project of algorithmic governance. In this sense, infrastructural absence becomes a technique of rule: it individualises risk and responsibility (Lazzarato, Reference Lazzarato2012), reframes moral obligation as personal accountability (Graeber, Reference Graeber2011), and extends neoliberal debtfare into digital form (Donovan and Park, Reference Donovan and Park2022a). By tracing these processes ethnographically, the article shows how algorithmic infrastructures govern through absence – normalising financial inclusion while displacing moral and political accountability onto borrowers in contexts of precarity and institutional fragility (Bear, Reference Bear2015; Elyachar, Reference Elyachar2005; James, Reference James2015).
Finally, the article highlights the business model underpinning fintech in Nigeria: short-term, high-interest loans coupled with the financialisation of user data. This model scales rapidly with minimal institutional presence, converting precarity into a source of accumulation. Yet it remains fragile, relying on opaque enforcement and unstable regulatory legitimacy. State interventions expose the vulnerability of platforms whose authority depends on trust they cannot fully command. As fintech expands across the global south, the Jimeta case illustrates both the expansive and destructive potential of this model: it widens access to credit while deepening exploitation, eroding trust, and displacing local moral economies of debt. These dynamics reveal how contemporary capitalism increasingly governs through infrastructural absence. This process demands closer comparative and conceptual scrutiny.
Acknowledgments
I thank the Editors of Finance and Society as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft.
Disclosure statement
No competing interests to declare.
Consent
Informed written consent to take part in and publish this research was obtained prior to the commencement of this study. All participants were adults (taken to mean people that are 18 years and above) and have been assigned a pseudonym in this article. Any details which might lead to their identification have been omitted.
Ethical approval
This research was subject to a full ethical review by the Research Ethics Committee of University College London (Ref. 23913/001).
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