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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the growing importance of digital-based financial inclusion as a form of organising development interventions through networks of state institutions, international development organisations, philanthropic investment and fintech companies. The fintech–philanthropy–development complex generates digital ecosystems that map, expand and monetise digital footprints. Its ‘know thy (irrational) customer’ vision combines behavioural economics with predictive algorithms to accelerate access to, and monitor engagement with, finance. The digital revolution adds new layers to the material cultures of financial(ised) inclusion, offering the state new ways of expanding the inclusion of the ‘legible’, and global finance new forms of ‘profiling’ poor households into generators of financial assets.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Daniela Gabor is associate professor in economics at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She holds a PhD in banking and finance from the University of Stirling (2009). Since then, she has published on central banking in crisis, on the governance of global banks and the IMF and on shadow banking and repo markets. Her latest publications include a co-edited book with Charles Goodhart, Jakob Vestegaard and Ismail Erturk entitled Central Banking at Crossroads (Anthem Press, 2014); The (impossible) Repo Trinity (Review of International Political Economy, 2016); Banking on Bonds (Journal of Common Market Studies, with Cornel Ban, 2015) and A Step Too Far? The European FTT on Shadow Banking (Journal of European Public Policy, 2015). With Jakob Vestergaard, she leads the INET grant Managing Shadow Money (2015–2017), aiming to rethink money in an age of shadow banking. She tweets at @DanielaGabor.
Sally Brooks is lecturer in international development at the University of York and has more than 23 years experience of research and practice within the international development sector. She holds a DPhil in development studies from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex (2008). Since then, she has published on food security and smallholder agriculture, science and technology for development, the role of ‘new philanthropy’ and financialisation and/of development. Her latest publications include Inducing Food Insecurity: Financialisation and Development in the Post-2015 Era (Third World Quarterly, 2016); Philanthrocapitalism, ‘pro-poor’ Agricultural Biotechnology and Development, in B. Morvaridi (ed.), New Philanthropy and Social Justice (Policy Press, 2015) and Enabling Adaptation? Lessons from the new ‘Green Revolution’ in Malawi and Kenya (Climatic Change, 2014). She tweets at @sallyhbrooks.
Notes
1. Through initiatives such as (tax-free) Individual Savings Account, stakeholder pensions, insure with rent schemes and the promotion of credit unions.
2. Peru's superintendent of banks and pension funds suggested an even more dystopian disciplining technique for the ‘unbanked’. The FI revolution, he argued, would solve employment problems in poor countries when accompanied by psychometric testing for those without formal education. Combined with the World Bank’s pathology of the excluded, these would serve to confirm the ‘scarcity’ of cognitive resources in the poor, and to design behaviour-based approaches for discipline (AFI Citation2014a).
3. Roy (Citation2010), for example, describes the post-crisis efforts of the Moody’s Research Lab, a ‘research incubator’ recently established within Moody’s Corporation and providing credit ratings for debt instruments and securities. The task of the lab is to ‘map the risk frontiers associated with hitherto unbanked markets’.