It is ‘[f]intech’s moment in Africa’, reads the headline of a 2022 McKinsey blog. At the risk of ascribing meaning to what might be the harmless punctuation of the global consulting firm’s media team, such a title infers what many so-called development experts seem to believe – that the global fintech explosion has taken a detour to the African continent. Growing internet penetration, coupled with the relatively low diffusion of legacy banking systems, promises to unleash staggering revenues for digitally enabled financial services in Africa. As a portmanteau of finance and technology, the word ‘fintech’ captures innovations in the delivery and outreach of traditional financial services, such as credit and insurance, as well as entirely new products such as mobile money and cryptocurrencies.
Beyond the financial sector, fintech has captured the developmental imagination, proponents of which celebrate African cities as a test bed of innovation and frontier of financial inclusion (Gabor and Brooks, 2017). In contrast, critical scholars in the social sciences and humanities argue that fintech products and programs have reproduced neo-liberal, extractive and colonial configurations, creating financialized and datafied subjects (Bernards, 2022; Langley and Leyshon, 2022).
Our work centres on fintech in Africa – with particular attention to Nairobi, a city dubbed ‘the Silicon Savannah’ and known for its early adoption of technologies (like M-Pesa). Focussing on Nairobi’s fintech ecosystem, we aim to muddy the binary between developmental enthusiasm and critical rejection of fintech innovation in Africa. Drawing inspiration from STS scholarship, we deploy an ambivalent view of financial technologies and their role in urban economies. Such a position is attentive to the recursive nature of technological enrolment while resisting perspectives that position African cities (the start-ups, government departments, and users) as late receivers – or powerless subjects – of technology or innovation from elsewhere (Elyachar, 2023).
As part of this project, we will be mapping fintech innovations taking place in Nairobi, cataloguing the technologies and understanding how they were conceptualized, developed, financed, and sustained. We are particularly interested in fintech that has a direct relationship with urban economies, such as the use of cryptocurrency in land banking, e-payments for last-mile logistics, and micro-lending for off-grid services.
Building on this descriptive exercise, we consider the historical contingencies, contemporary impacts, and speculative imaginaries that animate fintech technologies, ecosystems, and programs. We suggest that such a perspective allows for overlapping value propositions and differentiated readings of wealth accumulation and distribution.
As we progress, we plan to select particular fintech products, unpacking the ways in which these technologies shape calculations of urban risk, promise predictive capacity and social mobility, enrol mystical sensibilities, produce and shape value extraction, and extend the logics of speculation into new domains of urban life in Nairobi and beyond.
