Abstract This article examines how the absence of physical branches and embodied oversight in fintech reconfigures financial life in Nigeria. Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jimeta, it shows that the absence of physical infrastructures and the dominance of virtual ones is not merely technical but an active condition that reshapes moral obligation, trust, and accountability in borrowing. Branchless fintech enables users, mostly Muslims, to rationalise interest-bearing loans as private acts beyond communal or religious scrutiny – a process conceptualised as financial secularisation. Yet the same absence generates mistrust as users perceive fintech as intangible and unreliable. The article also shows how the impersonal nature of fintech borrowing encourages default, which fintech companies counter through coercive digital enforcement. These dynamics reveal a dialectic of absence and presence: physical absence weakens moral accountability while hyper-visible digital oversight reinstates coercion. The article contributes to debates on credit-debt relations and infrastructure by showing how digital finance transforms moral economies in the global south and reshapes financial subjectivities.

Abstract We examine the implications of tokenization for the transformation of things into financial assets. Framed as the ‘democratization’ of financial investment by its advocates, tokenization is a process whereby asset ownership is fractionalized and represented by a digital token to be sold to potential investors on blockchain-based platforms. Tokenization can be seen as an extension of securitization to illiquid real-world assets or digital assets; as such, tokenization is often framed as a technique to isolate risks, reduce financing costs, and generate returns without selling the underlying assets. For example, real estate security tokens offer fractionalized ownership to smaller investors through digital means lowering entry barriers, though such investors still typically lack exposure to diversified real estate token portfolios. Through an analytical and empirical investigation, we argue the governance claims made about tokenization obscure a key contradiction: tokenization is touted as a way to democratize financial markets, but the necessary adaptation of tokenization to prevailing financial market infrastructures undermines this democratization promise. Engaging with this contradiction, we unpack the governance of financial markets and assets through the techno-financial transformation of things into digital tokens, focusing on the promise of tokenization to democratize finance.

Abstract This essay coins and develops the concept of Longevity Capitalism, a biopolitical and financial regime in which both the condition of living longer and the pursuit of longevity are transformed into frontiers of accumulation. As financialisation extends into the domain of ageing, longevity – once a social and fiscal challenge – has been reframed as an investment opportunity. The essay traces a shift from collective welfare management to individualized risk-bearing, showing how uncertainty about life expectancy is converted into a new asset class. Drawing on examples such as financial instruments that profit from longevity risk, the rise of ‘age-tech’, and Silicon Valley’s ventures in life extension, it shows how biological time is increasingly treated as an economic resource. It also examines the speculative pursuit of ‘longevity escape velocity’, where technological innovation is imagined to outpace ageing and death itself becomes a technical problem. Together, these developments reveal a system in which longer life functions as a perpetually deferred investment cycle – an economy sustained by its own postponement. The essay argues that economic and biological time, wealth and health, are now fused within a single regime of managed futurity, reflecting new forms of power over who – and how – gets to live longer.

Abstract The financial industry has become increasingly entangled with environmental matters of concern, constituting the phenomenon of ‘green’ finance. In this Forum, we approach green finance as financial climate governance to highlight its claim on finance’s role as legitimate and capable steward of the planet’s climate. This claim to govern and its promise to achieve desirable environmental conditions have made green finance a crucial object of investigation. However, we observe a growing fragmentation of green finance research along various fault lines, such as levels of analysis, normative positions, or academic structures. Calling for reassembling green finance scholarship, we posit a need for more integrative approaches, motivating this Forum’s central question: what integrative moves across socioeconomic research can enhance our understanding and judgement of green finance? The Forum gathers three contributions focused on: (1) integrating macro- and micro-approaches in green finance studies; (2) examining the politics of green finance as knowledge contestations; and (3) confronting stasis in green finance by exploring researchers’ agencies, emotions, and normativities. By reassembling green finance scholarship through integrative moves, we suggest marking green finance as a shared concern and fostering collective perspectives to bring clarity and constructive critique to what has become a dominant pursuit in facing the socioecological crisis.

Abstract The promise or intent of change is a fundamental feature of ‘green’ finance. Despite many observable and notable changes in financial discourse, disclosure practices, products, and regulatory reforms, many green finance researchers are also painfully aware of the various ways in which green finance falls short of its promise. Being confronted with stasis creates feelings of frustration and gives rise to fundamental questions about the role of researchers in conducting research in this area and their normative stances towards their research objects. To generate movement away from stasis, this article calls for a more explicit consideration of researchers’ agency, emotions, and normativities in green finance research. Drawing on the metaphor of paths and path-making – a generative tool for thinking across various disciplines – it outlines different types of agency that can help researchers in orienting themselves along different pathways of change. In reflecting on these agencies, the article advocates for fostering explicit discussions on the diverse normative stances present in green finance research. This approach aims to inspire opportunities for collective authorship on specific and pressing questions, ultimately enhancing the collective agency of socio-economic scholarship in the field of green finance.

Abstract The complexities and contradictions of ‘green’ finance demand multidimensional perspectives in critical socioeconomic research. Current studies often remain fragmented, focusing either on global financial structures or micro-level practices without fully integrating both. This essay advocates for a more integrated analytical approach, employing three components: constructions, cleavages, and complementarities. At the micro-level, green finance is constructed by diverse actors, influencing macro-level financial governance and capital flows. Conversely, macro-structural shifts, driven by geopolitical and institutional dynamics, shape micro-level activities forging new alliances and oppositions – cleavages. Since the responses of actors and their institutional context to green finance are diverse, new institutional and agentic complementarities emerge. How green finance alters the relationship between financial markets and political-economic institutions, and how this unfolds across national economies, shapes our understanding of capitalist varieties and the emergence of new actors and networks. The essay contends that linking these dimensions and integrating micro- and macro-approaches enables scholarship to pursue a shared understanding of green finance and its (in)capacities to confront socioecological crises under financial capitalism.

Abstract This essay argues for an integrative move in the investigation of the politics of ‘green’ finance. We suggest that approaching the politics of ‘green’ finance in the form of knowledge contestations can bring out complementarities and bridge divides between different levels of analysis and theoretical traditions. Our focus is motivated by the pivotal role of knowledge and ignorance in the organisation and governance of financial markets identified in economic sociology, political economy, and neighbouring disciplines. Drawing on this scholarship, we consider knowledge both a forum for and a means of politics. We then illustrate how this conceptualisation provides insights into the politics of ‘green’ finance on different levels of analysis and following different theoretical traditions: in the context of tracing elites in their dissemination of specific ideas shaping governance regimes; when following market devices which produce partial calculative representations of the world; in problematising how financial organisations both produce and accept certain types of knowledge to further their interests; and when examining the role of ideology and imaginative capture in stabilising financial capitalism during climate crisis. We conclude by identifying the connective tissue between these different analytical and theoretical approaches made visible by the integrative concept of politics as knowledge contestations.

Abstract Is the formation of venture capital (VC) markets a national phenomenon? Against the common view that VC emerged in the US in the post-WWII period and later (yet independently) in Europe, we argue that the uneven relation between US and UK VC markets was crucial for British VC formation since the 1980s. Based on an empirical analysis of secondary literature and financial data, the article demonstrates that this relation is better understood through the lens of international financial subordination and identifies three types of dependencies to qualify this relation: the dependencies of UK VC on US start-up investments, US growth capital, and US exit deals. This type of financial subordination is specific to ‘alternative finance’, because highly profitable VC exits kick-started a flywheel effect in UK VC in the 2000s, and the subsequent expansion of British VC went hand in hand with a concentration of capital because UK VC followed a ‘winners-take-all’ logic that is characteristic of alt-finance in general. This suggests, counterintuitively, that after UK VC formed, the US economy benefitted more in financial, economic, and technological terms from the growing British VC market than its UK counterpart mainly because most large exit deals took place in the US.

Abstract With reference to Elon Musk’s FinTech strategy for X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, this essay critically interrogates the evolution of North American and European FinTech economies toward what is typically called ‘embedded finance’; that is, the technological integration of monetary and financial services into discrete social interactions and economic transactions by nonfinancial companies. We argue that embedded finance furthers the disappearance of FinTech as an evident market domain of technologically facilitated monetary and financial relations. Specialist FinTech startup intermediaries are receding into the background of an institutional and digital landscape shaped by strong monopolization tendencies. FinTech economies are increasingly dominated by major platform firms with the assistance of banks. Relatedly, FinTech services have become ubiquitous to the extent that they are taken for granted by people who are configured as platform users that are ripe for rent capture, rather than as sovereign consumers searching for products. The disappearance of FinTech should not be confused with its demise, however. Disappearance is the fullest expression of the transformative appearance of FinTech in people’s everyday monetary and financial lives over the last quarter century.

Abstract Modern monetary theory (MMT) argues that all governments that issue their own currency have the same fiscal and monetary policy space. This paper argues against this position. For MMT’s assumptions to be valid, MMT must abstract from the gravitational force of the US dollar that stems from it being backed by a mass of securities – an influence transmitted through international investment flows. Once the dollar’s gravitational force is recognised, it becomes clear that the huge size disparity separating the US financial market from those of other markets, and most notably those of the emerging market economies (EMEs), translates into an equally huge disparity regarding fiscal and monetary policy capacities. The strategic implications of recognising this disparity are that EME governments should, where possible, join their financial markets into regional blocs of sufficient size to give their regional currencies enough backing mass to allow them to resist the gravitational pull of the dollar. Only by pooling their currency sovereignty can EME governments retain some scope for pursuing macroeconomic policies independently of those pursued by the US government. Without doing so, if EME governments in countries with small financial markets follow MMT’s advice to retain their local currencies, this will condemn these currencies to entrapment in the dollar’s gravitational field and possibly outright dollar colonisation.