The expanding application of financial technologies, as well as growing participation of consumer investors, has multiplied the forms and functions of finance, deepening its entanglement with social, political, and cultural processes. This interview responds to increasing interest within the journal’s community in the evolving intersections of finance, technology, and society. The conversation foregrounds the role of fintech – understood both narrowly as communication infrastructures and broadly as socio-technical environments – in reconfiguring these relationships. Also, by situating finance as an interdisciplinary pivot, the interview further highlights emerging research frontiers, including blockchain, venture capital, and the crypto economy, while also reflecting on the methodological challenges and academic struggles that accompany their study. Taken together, the discussion points toward an evolving research agenda across various relevant fields.

This article examines how the absence of physical branches and embodied oversight in fintech reconfigures financial life in Nigeria. Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jimeta, it shows that the absence of physical infrastructures and the dominance of virtual ones is not merely technical but an active condition that reshapes moral obligation, trust, and accountability in borrowing. Branchless fintech enables users, mostly Muslims, to rationalise interest-bearing loans as private acts beyond communal or religious scrutiny – a process conceptualised as financial secularisation. Yet the same absence generates mistrust as users perceive fintech as intangible and unreliable. The article also shows how the impersonal nature of fintech borrowing encourages default, which fintech companies counter through coercive digital enforcement. These dynamics reveal a dialectic of absence and presence: physical absence weakens moral accountability while hyper-visible digital oversight reinstates coercion. The article contributes to debates on credit-debt relations and infrastructure by showing how digital finance transforms moral economies in the global south and reshapes financial subjectivities.

With reference to Elon Musk’s FinTech strategy for X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, this essay critically interrogates the evolution of North American and European FinTech economies toward what is typically called ‘embedded finance’; that is, the technological integration of monetary and financial services into discrete social interactions and economic transactions by nonfinancial companies. We argue that embedded finance furthers the disappearance of FinTech as an evident market domain of technologically facilitated monetary and financial relations. Specialist FinTech startup intermediaries are receding into the background of an institutional and digital landscape shaped by strong monopolization tendencies. FinTech economies are increasingly dominated by major platform firms with the assistance of banks. Relatedly, FinTech services have become ubiquitous to the extent that they are taken for granted by people who are configured as platform users that are ripe for rent capture, rather than as sovereign consumers searching for products. The disappearance of FinTech should not be confused with its demise, however. Disappearance is the fullest expression of the transformative appearance of FinTech in people’s everyday monetary and financial lives over the last quarter century.

With fintech investment apps providing convenience and round-the-clock access to financial markets on the go, investors are becoming more active in managing their financial lives through smartphones and other mobile devices. However, fintech investing’s role in the financialization of everyday life remains unclear. Combining insights from Foucauldian governmentality and Science and Technology Studies (STS), this article positions fintech brokerage apps as both neoliberal tools in governing investor conduct and as agencements in reconfiguring financial subjectivities. Based on a survey and interviews with lay investors in Singapore, the findings reveal that fintech investors use app-based brokerages as a tool to invest conveniently and at low cost. However, users themselves may resist the financial subjectivities promoted by fintech investing, driven by skepticism towards gamified and other algorithmic app features. They are also motivated by feelings of uncertainty towards fledgling fintech startups and difficulties in their interactions with the app user interface. To mitigate uncertainty, investors adopt various tactics to protect their portfolios.

Digital innovations in insurance, ‘InsurTech’, bring together two transformational forces in our contemporary world – risk and digitization. InsurTech has been celebrated and criticized. A literature on the social studies of insurance provides valuable and more nuanced insights into the social, cultural, and technological properties of InsurTech but it tends to analyze these at the firm level. This article brings together themes from assemblage and international political economy theories to integrate analysis of the structure of the global industry and the role of cross-border regulatory arrangements with the firm-level insights of the social studies of insurance literature. The article examines differentiation in the industry structure between stages of the insurance value chain, between incumbent and start-up insurers and Big Tech, and across jurisdictions and regions. It also examines the most globally significant regulatory responses to InsurTech: from the International Association of Insurance Supervisors, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the US National Association of Insurance Commissioners. It shows that the nuance and ethical content that is evident at the firm level in the social studies of insurance literature is interacting with similar nuance and ethical content in global regulatory arrangements.

Amidst the global ascent of financial technologies (FinTech), Argentina presents a critical case for examining how these platforms shape debt relations among marginalized households. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this article draws on quantitative data from the Central Bank of the Republic of Argentina and the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, alongside qualitative findings from a case study conducted in Buenos Aires’ largest slum. The article conceptualizes FinTech as an integral part of the lower tiers of the credit market, functioning as a mechanism for extending debt. The findings reveal that FinTech platforms do not displace existing credit sources but instead operate alongside them, providing new channels for debt that deepen financial dependence. FinTech’s role in marginalized communities, therefore, is less about banking the unbanked and more about reconfiguring access to unsecured debt, allowing for immediate consumption amidst financial instability. The article in this way contributes to the literature on FinTech by offering an understanding of FinTech’s embeddedness in everyday financial practices, showing how marginalized users engage with FinTech as a tactical response to their socio-economic conditions, exercising agency within constrained circumstances shaped by debt and financial precarity.

Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression is a book published by members of the Economic Space Agency. Its objective is to frame protocols (social agreements) on which to build the conditions for an economic system that is distributed (no centralised control) and can express network views about what constitutes, and how to measure, ‘value’ (value beyond profit). An insightful review by William Morgan (2024) probes some key dimensions of our project. This reply both reframes some of William’s insights and takes issue with others, especially those which emphasise a Hayekian interpretation.

While FinTech gets promoted as an innovative and progressive solution to meeting financial needs globally, it is afflicted by pervasive gender inequalities, only recently noticed in research. To explore these gender inequalities at the core of FinTech, we use a mixed-methods approach, combining data on 100 leading FinTech firms and 15 interviews with FinTech professionals, collected in the latter half of 2021. We argue that women in FinTech face the ‘triple glass ceiling’ at the intersection of financial, technological, and entrepreneurial gender inequalities. Our sample shows that women account for only 7.69% of (co-)founders, 18.2% of executive committee members, and merely 4.04% of FinTech companies are led by a woman. Gendered stereotypes and a privileging of masculine performances produce significant barriers to women entering and progressing within FinTech. Discriminatory practices are overt and implicit, everyday and exceptional, micro and acute. Shattering the ‘triple glass ceiling’ in FinTech represents an immense challenge.

The rise of financial technology (FinTech) engenders novel business models through integrating financial services and information and communication technologies (ICT). Digital currencies and payments, data mining, and other FinTech applications threaten to radically overhaul the financial sector. This article argues that, while we are becoming aware of how technology giants such as Apple Inc. are making inroads into financial services, we need to become more sensitive to how financial incumbents mimick ICT firms while aiming to neutralize the FinTech challenge. Practices from Silicon Valley are spilling over into ‘traditional’ finance through a process we dub Appleization. We illustrate how incumbents aim to remain indispensable amidst rapid digitization. Mimicking tech strategies, financial incumbents resort to transforming legacy ICT systems into integrated platforms, cultivating entrepreneurial ecosystems where startups are ‘free’ to compete whilst effectively being locked into the incumbent's orbit. We illustrate this by comparing Apple's business features (locking-in developers, customers and state into a hybrid business model based on a synergy between hardware, software and data-driven platform components) with emerging practices in the financial industry. Our analogy suggests that the Appleization of finance might radically transform, yet not undercut the oligopolistic position of financial incumbents.

Fintech is celebrated for its disruptive and democratizing qualities that dis/reintermediates the finance value chain. Claims of a ‘fintech revolution’ assume that fintech is ‘disruptive’ because of its innovative capabilities, but the extent to which these disruptive forces have reconfigured consumer financial knowledge and practices is not well understood. Using a questionnaire to survey retail consumers in Singapore on their use of fintech in performing different financial tasks, this article critically examines these claims of disruption and democratization by grounding them in the financial behaviors of consumers as informed by a financial ecologies approach. The results show a limited impact of fintech in shaping consumer financial behaviors. Respondents use fintech mainly for basic transactional purposes like making mobile payments and account management, but not so much for more complex matters like savings, investing and credit. The findings also reveal a ‘stickiness’ in financial behaviors that emphasizes the high touch points of human interaction. This study illustrates fintech's variegated material outcomes by highlighting the unevenness in consumption of digital financial services and the enduring importance of human relationality in financial decision making.

This essay reviews two recent books—Marion Laboure and Nicolas Deffrennes's Democratizing Finance and Eswar S. Prasad's The Future of Money—on financial technology (fintech) and the future of money. Both books present overviews of recent developments in fintech and assess the prospects of technological change to deliver a more accessible, equitable financial system—described in both cases as the “democratization of finance.” I raise two key concerns about the limits of the “democratization” implied here. First, the vision of democratized finance implicit in both books rests on claims about widening access to financial services for individuals, households, and businesses. This contrasts with more substantive visions of democratized finance that entail the exercise of accountable, deliberative decision-making on monetary and financial questions. Second, “fintech democracy” rests on a very thin account of how finance might be democratized, stressing exogenous technological change, with little consideration of relations of power, institutional reforms, or mobilization. Both books provide eloquent and comprehensive overviews of emerging fintech debates, but in so doing ultimately reveal important limitations to achieving financial democracy through fintech.

This paper purports to study the enormous proliferation of fintech online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending in Indonesia, along with their risks and the prevailing regulations of fintech online P2P lending. This article also suggests a varied spectrum of regulatory actions for regulating online P2P lending as an approach to increase consumer protection and stimulate the growth of Indonesia’s financial inclusion. It highlights the regulative risks and challenges of fintech online P2P lending in Indonesia and has discovered various spectra of regulatory responses that the Indonesian government can practise to regulate this potential industry. Solid recommendations were also given to regulators to better develop the present regulatory framework. This paper adds to the literature on the prevailing practice of online P2P lending by offering a legal outlook involving legal protection and the newly emerging fintech industry from an Indonesian context.