The Rise of the Investor-driven Fintech model : All that glitters is not gold

This paper examines the spectacular rise of 'fintech' (financial technology), an innovation that constitutes an historic discontinuity in the structure, operations and conduct of financial systems everywhere. We provide a much-needed corrective to the rapidly proliferating myths and falsehoods surrounding the capacity of fintech to address poverty and promote sustainable and equitable local economic and social development in the Global South by extending 'financial inclusion'. We point out that the basic fintech model is actually an 'investor-driven' fintech model that evolved in such a way as to overwhelmingly serve the private enrichment and ideological agendas of a narrow global elite composed of venture capitalists and leading investment institutions, the world's major financial, telecom and digital payments corporations, the main international development agencies (especially the World Bank), well-financed digital utopian advocacy bodies (notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), the major consultancy companies, and several leading governments in the advanced countries. In very widely claiming that the investor-driven fintech model is all about the delivery of major economic and social benefits to all citizens, we argue that the fintech model is being 'sold' to governments in the L&MICs on the basis of an almost entirely false premise