“With the provision of financial services having transitioned from bank branches to smartphones, today Wall Street doesn’t just fund Silicon Valley—it competes with it, and increasingly has merged with it. Breaking through the techno-solutionist bluster, Langley and Leyshon cogently explain how the leading lights of ‘FinTech Capital’—from Alipay to Klarna—are reshaping our everyday monetary and financial lives.”
—Brett Christophers, Professor of Human Geography, Uppsala University

“In this important book, Langley and Leyshon surface what wealthy and powerful tech companies hope to conceal: the financial and monied capital moving behind the scenes and shaping people’s everyday lives. FinTech Capital powerfully employs a Marxist analysis that complicates our understanding of ‘users’ within digital capitalism, describes strategic investments that companies use to reorganize markets and social relations, and situates these global dynamics within ongoing legacies of colonization.”
—Terri Friedline, Professor of Social Work, University of Michigan

“Where did FinTech come from, and how has it become so important to the world economy that it has challenged financial incumbents like banks and retail behemoths like Walmart? This provocative book tracks the rise of FinTech economies around the globe, which have catalyzed change in everyday payment behavior—pay by phone, pay by facial recognition, buy now, pay later, alternative credit scoring—as well as transformations of the capital markets and capitalism itself. The authors reveal the unique configuration of FinTech capital’s social relations and imperatives through firm-based case studies spanning the globe. It will be of interest to critical theorists of capitalism, economic geographers, and to general readers interested in how the FinTech phenomenon intertwines colonial histories with finance and technology.”
—Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology, Law, and Criminology, University of California, Irvine

*A thorough examination of the worldwide digital transformation of people’s everyday monetary and financial relations driven by the emergence of FinTech.

How people pay, make savings and investments, buy insurance, and take on debt is undergoing digital transformation across the globe. This book argues that FinTech is a distinct form of intermediary and rentier capital that is radically reorganizing the routine social relations of money and finance. People are being configured by FinTech capital as users and data rather than as consumers, a phenomenon we increasingly take for granted in our everyday lives.

Langley and Leyshon analyze the rise of FinTech capital through the intersecting processes of digital and financial capitalism that underpin it: platformization, datafication, monopolization, colonization, and capitalization. Platformization and datafication provide novel technologies and business models that reset the competitive coordinates and informational imperatives of monetary and financial intermediation. Monopolization and colonization dynamics reaffirm and renew institutional and geographical hierarchies and relations of plunder. And, all the while, FinTech has been sustained by huge volumes of investment from capitalization processes that are core to financial capitalism.

Illustrated by case studies of the FinTech operations of specialist startups, banks, telcos, and BigTechs based in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States, FinTech Capital will be of interest to social scientists of money, finance, and digital capitalism and all who want to understand this major transformation of contemporary economic life.

Paul Langley is Professor of Economic Geography, Durham University, UK. He is the author of Liquidity Lost: The Governance of the Global Financial Crisis; The Everyday Life of Global Finance: Saving and Borrowing in Anglo-America; and World Financial Orders: An Historical International Political Economy.

Andrew Leyshon is Senior Fellow, Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, UK, and Professor Emeritus, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Reformatted: Code, Networks, and the Transformation of the Music Industry; and coauthor of The Rise of the Platform Music Industries; and Money/Space: Geographies of Monetary Transformation.