Janet just published “Financial Platforms: Beyond the North/South Divide” In: Westermeier C, Campbell-Verduyn M, Brandl B, eds. The Cambridge Global Handbook of Financial Infrastructure.
Summary
Financial platforms are the basic infrastructure of emerging digital platform economies. As instantiations of “infrastructural power,” they partake in processes of politico-economic subordination or the creation and reproduction of structural inequalities. These processes of subordination are depicted in terms of a prevailing global logic and directionality: from the Global North to Global South. Thus, while financial platforms are apprehended as vectors of financialization globally, they are reduced to processes of financial inclusion when referencing the so-called Global South. What is missed are the pragmatic practices of financial platforms, or how they function as sites of value production and conversion, and what is at stake for diverse actors. An examination of the consolidation of a new financial infrastructure based on digital platforms in sub-Saharan Africa illustrates this point. Financial infrastructures constituted by a nexus of mobile telecommunications operators, mobile money issuers, remittance and payment services providers, and commercial banks generate new value forms, strategies, and practices. By focusing on the latter, it is possible to better appreciate processes of both value subjugation and autonomization, evidence that the fault lines of value production generated by financial platforms are obscured by the Global North versus Global South frame.
