Applications of digital technologies to retail money and finance have gathered pace across the globe over the last decade or so, constituting novel ‘FinTech’ economies. Although FinTech is registering across critical social scientific research, insufficient dedicated attention has been paid to FinTech in Africa. Bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines and fields, this special issue of eight papers asks what is different about the forms that FinTech is taking in Africa, and considers how foregrounding developments on the continent might reshape social science research agendas and political conversations around FinTech globally. In this Introduction, we show how the papers make three main conceptual and analytical moves to attune research to the distinctive features of FinTech in Africa, thereby shifting the focus for research (1) from global financial inclusion agendas to colonial histories and presents, (2) from economic formalization to multiple modes of economization, and, (3) from techno-economic ecosystems to statecraft and international security.
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