Finance is becoming tech – and in the process, changing how the future enters the present. This claim goes beyond the familiar story of ‘fintech’, in which digital tools transform the delivery of otherwise recognizable financial services. It points instead to a deeper change in how finance coordinates action under uncertainty. We introduce the concept of technofinance to name an emerging regime in which engineered infrastructures generate, rank, circulate, and act upon financial signals automatically, recursively, and at scale. We develop the concept across three interrelated dimensions. Infrastructurally, technical systems increasingly determine the conditions of participation, visibility, and eligibility. Performatively, code and automated feedback loops assume coordinating work once performed through expert interpretation and institutional judgement. Communicatively, dashboards, feeds, rankings, and alerts reorganize financial attention around continuous response. Together, these developments shift finance from a representational mode, organized around the narration of uncertain futures, toward an operational mode that technologically produces actionable presents. The result is a compression of financial time and the rise of a new mode of architectural power: the capacity to govern coordination in advance through protocols, parameters, defaults, and thresholds. When finance becomes tech, the social moves upstream into the design, ownership, and governance of technical systems. At stake, therefore, is not simply the future of financial services, but who – or what – determines which futures become visible, investable, and possible.

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.

Discussing recent literature on online financial practices, this article argues that ‘finance becoming tech’ assumes the form of particular financial situations in the everyday, to be understood in terms of Erving Goffman’s concept of interaction order. While the interactionist strand in the social study of finance foregrounds the role of techno-social situations in the constitution of finance, this article suggests applying Goffman’s notion of the ‘interaction order’ to that debate and demonstrates the latter’s capability to reconstruct the techno-social mechanisms through which finance emerges in the everyday. Unlike the notion of ‘situation’, that of ‘interaction order’ addresses the constitution of situational boundaries through interactional procedures as they refer only partially and selectively to circumstances of their social contexts. Against this background, online financial practices are analytically contoured as techno-social situations that enable the emergence of finance as a matter of the everyday. It is argued that the enabling condition for this commingling of everyday and financial processes is a specific delimitation of the digital-financial interaction order from parts of its political economic context – in particular, the uncertainty that structurally characterizes the financial economy.

With fintech investment apps providing convenience and round-the-clock access to financial markets on the go, investors are becoming more active in managing their financial lives through smartphones and other mobile devices. However, fintech investing’s role in the financialization of everyday life remains unclear. Combining insights from Foucauldian governmentality and Science and Technology Studies (STS), this article positions fintech brokerage apps as both neoliberal tools in governing investor conduct and as agencements in reconfiguring financial subjectivities. Based on a survey and interviews with lay investors in Singapore, the findings reveal that fintech investors use app-based brokerages as a tool to invest conveniently and at low cost. However, users themselves may resist the financial subjectivities promoted by fintech investing, driven by skepticism towards gamified and other algorithmic app features. They are also motivated by feelings of uncertainty towards fledgling fintech startups and difficulties in their interactions with the app user interface. To mitigate uncertainty, investors adopt various tactics to protect their portfolios.

Based on a study of the Swiss mobile payment app Twint and its use as a tool for charitable giving, this article introduces a framework for studying redistributive imaginaries and examines donation ‘marketplaces’ and their implications. Engaging with literatures on socio-technical imaginaries, the platformization of payment, post-humanitarianism, and the digital-solutionist ethic, the article asks what happens when practices of giving are facilitated and enclosed by a tech-ified finance industry. Twint’s catalog-like platform for donating reconfigures digital giving and its relation to redistribution. We argue that donations platforms like Twint’s are introducing a new redistributive imaginary by interpellating users as donors, consumers and citizens who – given behavioral psychology – need guidance to exercise choice and become more ethical selves. On the basis of an interface analysis and interviews, we specify a ‘post-sovereign consumer-citizen redistributive imaginary’, characterized by a market frame and tech-solutionism. This imaginary relies on a bounded-rationality model of the human and promotes a post-political idea of democratic participation. The article notes a slippage between different semantics of ‘good’ and ‘better’ technology, which are relevant for a discursive-ideological analysis of the FinTech sector and its rhetoric more broadly. Analyzing them helps us better understand how platform operators are accruing power culturally, economically, and politically.

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.

Technological leaps in the algorithmic processing of information are providing financial actors with new opportunities for transnational financial and legal management that optimize asset allocation. Global professional service firms are actively developing TaxTech to capture this market. How will this transformation change relationships between suppliers, clients, and regulators? A key development is a move away from deliberate opacity for secrecy purposes into systems that search for the optimal exploitation of legal affordances. This signals a transformation of the assumed information asymmetries between suppliers, clients, and regulators that sits at the heart of the Global Wealth Chains framework. It empowers owners of data and code. Here we reflect on this transformation, considering three examples of how algorithmic technologies are being used for international tax purposes: blockchains for instant trade verification; generative AI for automation of tax compliance; and algorithmic scenario planning for tax avoidance. These examples show an important shift in the governance of wealth chains – the creation of new forms of infrastructural power through which algorithmic models may become central nodes in tax governance.

Platform finance implies financial institutions’ growing dependence on the infrastructure and technologies of large tech firms. This reliance manifests itself most clearly in cloud services provision where American technological hegemony has triggered concerns about technological sovereignty in the European Union. In China, American Big Techs have not gained much of a foothold given the role of domestic Techfins in a wider attempt to install algorithmic governance. The observed interdependencies and segmentations of global digital technology networks warrant a further analysis of how cloud finance becomes enmeshed in wider geopolitical power struggles. Based on official document analysis, this article studies the geopolitical dimensions of cloud finance regulation in the EU, the US, and China. Given the fragmented nature of cloud regulation, it compiles insights from data protection, market competition, financial sector regulation, and cybersecurity to understand how cloud finance is governed in each macro-block. Our analysis shows how regulation in the three blocs supports US financial cloud hegemony, whilst producing financial cloud subordination of its geopolitical ally the EU and drawing China into financial cloud insulation.

Tech innovations have the potential to disrupt traditional banking by unbundling banking, money, and payments; however, their impact on the cross-border payments system (CBPS) – which still relies on correspondent banking (CoBanking) networks – remains uncertain. This uncertainty is compounded by the literature’s tendency to distinguish between cash clearing and credit and to focus on the latter. Challenging this distinction, the article offers a historical perspective on the role of credit in CoBanking and international payments. It reveals the deep-rooted importance of credit in the CBPS and highlights correspondent banks’ role in providing it. But deep-rooted does not mean static. Indeed, changes in bank-intermediated trade finance practices during and after WWI reshaped the London-based CoBanking network. Furthermore, cash clearing and credit operations remained remarkably congruent until at least the 1980s, as reflected in banks’ internal organisation, reporting, and contemporaries’ descriptions of the payment system. The article argues that adopting a definition of payment systems that integrates both cash clearing and credit is essential to understanding the history of CoBanking and how it supports the CBPS. It suggests that relying on tech firms to provide the elastic payments infrastructure the economy requires could equate to jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

In this article, I place the blockchain within competing interpretations of the present as either an emerging technofeudal mode of production, or as a relatively unchanged capitalism. Drawing on a wide literature on zones – spaces in nation-states where the usual rules do not apply – I highlight three reconfigurations of territory, authority, and rights (TAR) associated with the blockchain today. These are: (1) the transnational expansion of crypto-related practices; (2) the national regulation and legitimation of cryptoassets; and (3) the reemergence of a liberal discourse linking human rights to the global exchange of private property. Through these examples, I demonstrate how the blockchain is part of a broader reshaping of accumulation and legal legitimation, mirroring the emergence of capitalism and the nation-state, but on a global scale. I conclude by arguing against the position that the reemergence of fascism is a red herring distracting us from the coming technofeudalism; instead, I claim that technofeudalism obscures the links between today’s techno-authoritarian shift and the enforcement of global corporate private property relations.