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Abstract
This article interrogates recent policy pronouncements around the promotion of emerging financial technologies (fintech) as means of enabling financial inclusion. It is argued that situating this emergent ‘turn to technology’ in the context of a longer-running pattern of failed efforts to promote the development of financial markets for the poor in the Global South offers us a useful lens on the dynamics of neoliberalism. The article develops this analysis by drawing together interlinked discussions of ‘neoliberal reason’, highlighting the central role played by the diffusion of market institutions in neoliberal projects with Marxian discussions highlighting the crucial underlying role of labour in enabling the operation of markets. In this context the appeal to ever-more fine-grained information with which to allocate credit underlying the turn to technology can both be read as yet another attempt to ‘re-engineer’ the market, and also seen as a doomed project. Empirically, this argument is fleshed out through an engagement with key framework documents around financial inclusion and technology from the World Bank and G20.
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