Geographies of Fintech and Everyday Life: Reconfiguring Spaces, Practices, and Scales of Digital Money and Finance

Abstract

Financial and monetary technologies, understood both through their digital platforms and the materiality of mobile devices, are increasingly pervasive, and now shape the economic practices of individuals, households, and communities. In this critical synthesis we bring together research in economic geography on everyday life and financial and monetary technologies (fintech) to show the centrality of these technologies to daily life, and to suggest ways that research on the geographies of fintech could be deepened through attention to everyday life. We show how a focus on everyday life highlights the impact on fintech end-users, such as consumers and debtors, and their relationship to the (re)privatization of social reproduction, across a range of practices, spaces, and actors. We also show how financial technologies and digital platforms contribute to the construction and production of the mundane and habitual routines of daily life and connect up often-thought distinct sites and scales of activity. To demonstrate the value of our critical synthesis, we then analyze two examples, “Buy Now, Pay Later” (BNPL) and “Earned Wage Access” (EWA). These examples show how fintech products reconfigure the everyday life of payments, wages, and debt management, especially for cash-constrained consumers from whom these products are specifically designed to profit. Critically, we build the literature on everyday life and fintech in economic geography to argue that a synthesis of these literatures—the everyday life of fintech—provides a fruitful avenue to pursue new research at the intersection of the geographies of money and finance, platforms, and the digital economy.