Paper short abstract:

This paper examines financial inclusion as a development approach involving networks of state institutions, donors and ‘philanthropic’ fintech companies. Couched in language of including the excluded, it offers global finance new ways to ‘profile’ poor households into generators of financial assets

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the growing importance of digital-based financial inclusion as a form of organising international development interventions through networks of state institutions, development agencies and 'philanthropic investment' fintech companies. The fintech-philanthropy-development (FPD) complex generates digital ecosystems that map, expand and monetise digital footprints. This digital revolution offers 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.

Policy initiatives aimed at 'financial inclusion' have gathered pace since the global financial crisis of 2008. This paper traces a discursive shift that attributed these market failures, not to poorly regulated financial markets and institutions, but to individual consumers, in particular poorer, 'risky' consumers whose behavioural traits can and should be captured and 'nudged' in a more 'rational' direction using the tools of behavioural economics (see World Bank 2014, 2015).

Whose needs are being met here? While such programmes are couched in terminology of including the (financially) excluded, poverty in the developing world is cast as a new frontier for profit making and accumulation. Central to this vision is the potential of digital technologies to capture the data of the newly 'included' in ways that enable lenders to map, know and govern 'risky' populations', via algorithms that evade public scrutiny as private intellectual property.