The editors of Finance and Society invite submissions for a special issue on how financial services are fusing with digital technology and what the broader implications of this are in social, political, and economic terms.
The key dates are as follows:
- Abstracts by email to Adam Hayes and Carola Westermeier: October 1, 2024
- Full papers submitted via Manuscript Central: April 1, 2025
This special issue aims to foster a vibrant interdisciplinary dialogue that situates new trends in digital finance within a broader landscape of financial innovation and social change. Moving beyond the initial wave of fintech studies, we invite scholars from various disciplines to interrogate the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of emerging financial infrastructures across a range of settings.
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From the editors :
The seamless incorporation of financial capabilities such as payments, lending, insurance, banking, and investment into various sectors, including e-commerce, healthcare, and education, is posited as the next frontier for fintech. By embedding financial services into the fabric of everyday life, (non-financial) businesses aim to enhance customer experiences, create new revenue streams, and foster financial inclusion. But this process also raises broader questions about the role of finance in contemporary societies and the shifting politics of financial society. We seek contributions that go beyond the hype surrounding financial innovation to critically examine how the ‘disappearance of finance into technical infrastructures’ – as Paul Langley has recently described it – is reshaping social relations, power dynamics, and the very meaning of money itself.
‘Embedded finance’, as it is known in the industry, represents a departure from the decentralized finance (DeFi) narrative that has dominated recent discourse. While DeFi promised to democratize finance by disintermediating traditional gatekeepers, embedded finance leverages the power of centralized platforms to deliver financial services in a more accessible, context-specific manner. This tension between decentralization and embedding presents a rich avenue for social scientific inquiry, as it speaks to broader questions of trust, control, and the role of technology and institutions in mediating financial interactions. Central to the embedded finance trend are the technological infrastructures that enable financial services across diverse platforms and industries. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) models play a crucial role in this process, affording financial products and services without the need to build and maintain complex financial infrastructures themselves.
Meanwhile, several of the most central actors in finance continue to experiment with technologies that were originally intended to provide an alternative to centralized finance. More than 130 central banks around the globe are exploring the creation of their own digital currencies for wholesale and retail purposes with varying motivations and aims, ranging from financial inclusion to monetary sovereignty and new forms of cross-border payments. This tension between new technologies and established financial actors presents a promising opportunity for researchers interested in the co-evolution of economy and technology.