FinTech in Africa: an editorial introduction

ABSTRACT

Applications of digital technologies to retail money and finance have gathered pace across the globe over the last decade or so, constituting novel ‘FinTech’ economies. Although FinTech is registering across critical social scientific research, insufficient dedicated attention has been paid to FinTech in Africa. Bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines and fields, this special issue of eight papers asks what is different about the forms that FinTech is taking in Africa, and considers how foregrounding developments on the continent might reshape social science research agendas and political conversations around FinTech globally. In this Introduction, we show how the papers make three main conceptual and analytical moves to attune research to the distinctive features of FinTech in Africa, thereby shifting the focus for research (1) from global financial inclusion agendas to colonial histories and presents, (2) from economic formalization to multiple modes of economization, and, (3) from techno-economic ecosystems to statecraft and international security.

KEYWORDS:

• FinTech
• digital platforms
• colonialism
• modes of economization
• statecraft

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Vodafone, 2022. M-PESA. Available from: https://www.vodafone.com/about-vodafone/what-we-do/consumer-products-and-services/m-pesa [Accessed 10 June 2022]

2 Alliance for Financial Inclusion, 2011. G-20 Principles for Innovative Financial Inclusion: Executive Brief. Available from: https://www.gpfi.org/publications/g20-principles-innovative-financial-inclusion-executive-brief [Accessed 10 June 2022]

3 Alliance for Financial Inclusion. The Maya Declaration. Available from: https://www.afi-global.org/global-voice/maya-declaration/ [Accessed 10 June 2022]

4 International Monetary Fund, 2018. The Bali Fintech Agenda. IMF Policy Paper, October 2018. Available from: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/10/11/bali-fintech-agenda-a-blueprint-for-successfully-harnessing-fintechs-opportunities [Accessed 10 June 2022]