Banking on refugees: Racialized expropriation in the fintech era

Ali Bhagat and Leanne Roderick
Additional contact information
Ali Bhagat: Department of Politics, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Leanne Roderick: Urban Studies and Geography Departments, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada

Environment and Planning A, 2020, vol. 52, issue 8, 1498-1515

Abstract: Fintech and digital financial services involve the delivery of financial products and services through technology. Fintech companies are part of a financial lending infrastructure claiming to offer an alternative to ‘big banks’, and are often touted as digitally disruptive technology that is rapidly reshaping financial inclusion agendas and improving the lives of the poor. For many refugees living in camps and informal settlements in Kenya, fintech is often the only viable option for credit or microfinance aid. While refugees are often excluded from credit, the spread of fintech as a solution for direct peer-to-peer aid transfers from the Global North to refugees has resulted in the uneven distribution of credit access and livelihood support. Through fintech, private citizens and groups in the Global North are able to disrupt and subvert refugee assistance, deeming some worthy of aid while others face ongoing exclusion. While fintech remains a hopeful source of greater efficiency and empowerment, the direct transfer of aid money masks profit and corporate power by only extending assistance to those refugees who are appropriately entrepreneurial, that is to say those who will start small businesses and pay back their loans. This paper argues that processes of financial inclusion carried out by and through fintech are still distinguished largely by exclusion. In so doing, this paper highlights a theoretical position that refugee governance is embedded in racial forms of capital accumulation and expropriation.

Keywords: Fintech; refugees; migration; neoliberalism; race; Kenya (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X20904070 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:52:y:2020:i:8:p:1498-1515

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X20904070

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().