Financial geography III – Everyday lives of finance

Abstract

This third progress report on financial geography focuses on the everyday lives of finance. Moving beyond firm- and state-centric analyses, research increasingly foregrounds how financialisation permeates households, care relations and daily practices through variegated financial subjectivities, debt-based survival strategies and digital intermediation. Drawing on feminist political economy and critical approaches, the report highlights intersections of finance with social reproduction, gendered and racialised inequalities and the rise of fintech as a transformative yet potentially exploitative force. It concludes by identifying gaps in research on age and on state-technology relations, calling for intersectional, multi-scalar perspectives on finance’s lived and affective dimensions.

Introduction

Having covered the state-finance nexus and green finance, my final progress report takes a scalar shift to foreground the everyday lives of finance. As noted in a recent review of financial geography research since 2000 (Węgrzyn, 2025), the topic of financial centres is most prominent in terms of number of publications, but this is closely followed by financialisation and financial technology (fintech) in second and third places, respectively. The rapid growth of research on financialisation in geography and wider social sciences has been well noted (Hall, 2011), but research focussing on everyday lived dimensions of finance really took off since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath (Lai, 2018). This focus on everyday financial practices foregrounds the differentiated forms and sites of finance as encountered and negotiated by everyday consumers (Pike and Pollard, 2010). The growth of fintech especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic has also led to more financial geography research into how everyday financial practices are being reshaped by the rise of app-based finance and platform intermediation (Lai and Samers, 2021; Wójcik, 2021).

Over the past two decades, financial geographers have become more interested in how finance is shaping the fundamentals of living (e.g. housing and subsistence), life stages (e.g. parenthood and retirement) and of life itself (e.g. health and longevity). These have necessarily focused on the scale of the individual and households to investigate how social roles, cultural processes and broader political economic processes have shaped the financial knowledge and practices of everyday consumers, and their uneven incorporation into broader circuits of finance capital (Agunsoye, 2021; Harker and Montgomerie, 2020). Such studies have added fresh and vital perspectives to a subfield that had tended to privilege firm-based and state-based analyses, and operated at the city/urban or national scales. At the same time, these research studies on households and individuals offer crucial insights into state roles and ideologies, digital intermediation of finance and structural inequalities (such as gender, race and class).

The next section of this report outlines what is arguably the most prominent theme in research on everyday lives of finance – that of variegated financial subjectivities as studies uncover the broad range of logics and behaviours beyond the rational investor subject. This is followed by a focus on how care and structural inequalities are mobilised to connect finance, debt and the work required for social reproduction, which enable the daily and generational maintenance of households and labour but in new financialised ways. The penultimate section concerns the rise of fintech and digital platforms, which are fundamentally altering the geography and temporality of everyday financial practices, particularly the forms of debt in both developed and developing economies. The report concludes with some reflections on the relative paucity of financial geography research on age in everyday finance and implications of the changing relationships between state and (financial) technology in shaping future financial practices.

Variegated financial subjectivities

Research on the financialisation of everyday life shows the increasing consumption of financial products and financial logics in the context of dwindling state-welfare benefits. Through state-sponsored narratives that emphasise individual responsibility, normalisation of risk in financial management and calculative assessment of life goals, individuals are compelled or persuaded to seek markets solutions for personal life goals and future security. This requires ‘active’ financial assessments and actions via investment and insurance products instead of ‘passive’ savings (Lai, 2016). Individuals become ‘investor subjects’ (Langley, 2006) and ‘everyday asset managers’ (Hillig, 2019) in their daily lives, thus driving new growth markets for financial products and tying individuals and households ever more closely to the performance of financial markets (Lai, 2013). This ‘rational investor’ as a normative ideal constructed by the state and financial institutions also facilitates the transfer of risk from the collective to the individual.

Over time, researchers have also explored the broader bandwidth of financial subjectivities, such as uncertain or reluctant financial subjects (Langley, 2007). Individuals deviate from the neoliberal ideal of the ‘rational investor’ (or homo economicus) due to structural constraints, emotional conflicts or the inherent unpredictability of contemporary capitalist markets. Erturk et al. (2007), for instance, argues that we ‘live in a snakes and ladders world where earnings, wealth effects and final values are unpredictable so that the context for rational calculation is extraordinarily difficult’ (p. 562). Rather than being rational and entrepreneurial investors, the more likely scenario is that of misplaced confidence in their own financial literacy and decision-making abilities. Individuals become uncertain subjects as they lack the necessary knowledge to navigate complex products or are faced with structural constraints, and yet are tasked with managing their own financial welfare (Agunsoye and James, 2024). Therefore, they may opt for the safety of savings accounts or rely on (presumably) ever-rising property markets to secure their financial future (Agunsoye, 2021; Lai, 2017). Some populations also shoulder additional financial and social burdens due to, for instance, gender, class or race characteristics. Women may opt out of the labour market (thus losing access to pensions) or limit contributions to pension or investment schemes to cope with high childcare costs (Agunsoye and James, 2024). Financial literacy campaigns have increasingly targeted lower income individuals, women and ethnic minorities, who are frequently identified as needing better financial knowledge and self-governance (Loomis, 2018). However, these framings overlook the structural constraints and social expectations (such as who has primary responsibilities for children or those in multigenerational households) that are necessarily embedded within the financial rationalities of diverse subjects (James and Agunsoye, 2023; Loomis, 2022; Pellandini-Simányi and Banai, 2021). Others have noted that financialisation produces a financial ‘other’ or homo subprimicus (Kear, 2013), who are included in the financial system as risky populations to be managed and profited from (for instance, through higher interest rates or specific subprime products). They are governed not through empowerment or rights but through technologies that attempt to make their unpredictability profitable in subprime markets (Wyly et al., 2009).

Other than uncertain financial subjects, affective subjects have also emerged as researchers examine the moral and intimate foundations of financial decision-making. These studies recognise that values and expectations regarding life stages, care roles and responsibilities, and personal life goals shape financial logics and practices (Dawney et al., 2020; Deville and Seigworth, 2015; Loomis, 2022). The focus on emotions and affect is important in demonstrating how financial subjects are not ‘emotional’ in terms of being ‘irrational’ but rather emotionally oriented in the operation of financial logics, which form an intrinsic part of governing financial subjectivities (Pettersson and Wettergren, 2021). Moral positions also shape finance rationality, for instance, individuals may avoid investing as the uncertainty and potential loss on capital is perceived as akin to gambling (Hillig, 2019; Lai, 2017). These decisions are not the result of being ‘passive’ (i.e. not being active investors) but emerged from active evaluations of financial options, opportunity costs and potential outcomes, set against social roles, kinship ties and moral values (Karaagac 2020; Loomis 2018).

The formation of neoliberal investor subjects is relevant for the state not only in terms of rolling back welfare provisions but also to mobilise individuals and households for other state objectives. The state is an active agent in the production of financial citizenship through championing particular financial responsibilities and duties (Lai and Tan, 2015). Individual consumers become citizen subjects who contribute to state objectives such as financial inclusion, nation-building and financial centre strategies. These are often embedded in state-sponsored financial literacy programmes, microfinance schemes or particular product innovations from state-owned banks to evoke particular roles and responsibilities of the individual consumers to contribute to nation-building and further state legitimacy through their participation in financial markets (Jafri, 2023; Morris, 2018; Rahman et al., 2020).

Recent research has significantly expanded the bandwidth of financial subjectivities, from neoliberal investor subjects to uncertain financial subjects, affective subjects, moral subjects and citizenship subjects. These studies emphasise the lived materialities and emotive elements of quotidian financial practices to reveal how finance is knitted into the fabric of everyday life in terms of its lived, affective and political qualities.

Care and social reproduction

The connection between financialisation and social reproduction highlights how the expansion of financial markets and logics increasingly encroaches, relies upon and exploits the daily and generational work of maintaining households and communities (Karaagac, 2020). Such work often deploys a feminist political economy lens in critical response to mainstream financial geographical scholarship that has tended to focus on financial elites in established financial centres. These studies explore how people make use of financial products, services and narratives, often in creative ways, to organise and manage care relations (Green et al., 2025), although such care work could also be extracted to service the interest of financial institutions and private markets instead (Pollard, 2013). Research on everyday finance and social reproduction covers three major themes: the privatisation of social provisioning through debt, the extension of unwaged labour in caring for debts and the amplification of gendered and racialised inequalities.

The privatisation of social provisioning has resulted in the expansion of debt to cope with daily living. Faced with declining wages and reduced social welfare provision, households become increasingly reliant on the use of credit not only for housing purchase or to cope with emergencies but also for basic necessities (Pollard et al., 2020). This deepening dependence on personal and household debt for survival comes with increased exposure to the risks of defaults (Anderson et al., 2020; Baker, 2021; Deville and Seigworth, 2015; McFall, 2014). As Kear (2013) argues, the steady growth in credit, debt and investment in the past 30 years has served as a means of social regulation, particularly for states looking to offload responsibility for economic outcomes to the market. Soederberg (2013) calls this the ‘debtfare state’, whereby neoliberal states discipline the working poor by encouraging them to rely on credit (such as credit cards and payday loans) while allowing financial institutions to generate high levels of income from uncapped interest rates. Such expansion of debt increasingly subjects individuals and households to the disciplinary requirements of the market. This becomes even more acute during financial crises and austerity (Hall, 2016). Even for mortgages that are considered a ‘good debt’ (perceived as investing in an appreciating asset), there are significant impacts on future labour, decision-making and well-being of individuals and households to service mortgage debt repayments. García-Lamarca and Kaika’s (2016) study shows how the promise of mortgages as a means to optimise income and wealth becomes bound up with cycles of global financial and real-estate speculation. When the system fails, mortgages become a punitive technology that not only disrupts people’s access to housing but also their livelihoods, health and the capacity to care for family. Other researchers have explored how social housing, which caters to marginalised and vulnerable populations such as low income, disabled and racialised minorities, has become new sites of financial speculation and capital accumulation across various countries such as the UK, US, Ireland, France and Germany (Clare et al., 2022; Goulding, 2024; Wijburg et al., 2024).

Financial products, practices and institutions are increasingly essential to how people organise, extend and manage care relations (Green et al., 2025), such as the use of insurance in Brazil to negotiate care for frail elderly parents (Bähre and Gomes, 2025), fintech apps to scale up traditions of community fundraising in Kenya (Kusimba, 2025) and financial instruments to fund animal rescue in the United States (Caldwell, 2025). However, the crisis of care often compels people to become indebted to afford basic needs and care for their families, meaning indebtedness is often a necessity, not an option. While research on everyday financialisation has produced a growing body of work on various configurations of investor subjects, some would argue that the everyday reality of finance actually lies in debt-financed lives and not in investments (Dawney et al., 2020; Deville and Seigworth, 2015; Vargha and Pellandini-Simányi, 2021). A feminist political economy approach is particularly useful here in conceptualising everyday financial decisions and practices as integral to neoliberal capitalism’s productive and reproductive processes (Pollard, 2013; Pollard et al., 2020). It foregrounds the myriad forms of unwaged caregiving and provisioning that produce and reproduce workers, families and communities. This includes a wider suite of reproductive work that includes emotional, caring and affective labour and multiple sites of reproductive work beyond the home such as on the street, playgrounds, places of worship and so on. In an adaptation of Gibson-Graham's (2006) famous iceberg model of the economy, Karaagac (2020) demonstrates how formal financial instruments, products and services for household finance and debt management are only the tip of the financialisation iceberg; below the waterline are an array of informal and often invisible time and labour that are fundamental to sustaining debt relations. These include remittances, pawning, bargaining, worrying and cutting back – an assortment of affective, emotional, mental and physical work of ‘caring for debts’ (Montgomerie and Tepe-Belfrage, 2017; see also Dawney et al., 2020; Roberts and Zulfiqar, 2019; Hall, 2018). Both formal and informal financial relations become integrated into household management, which usually results in increased unpaid domestic labour to meet ‘the demands of financial calculation’ (Bryan et al., 2009: 463) related to managing debt and risk.

The growing incursion of financial relations and logics in everyday life are also shaped by structural inequalities, particularly gender and race. Agunsoye and James’s (2024) research shows that coping strategies deployed by individuals for financial needs are not irrational but are shaped by the inequalities inherent within a capitalist welfare state that disadvantage women and ethnic minorities. While these groups are often positioned as being most likely to be excluded from formal circuits of financial products and services, they usually perform much more prominent financial roles when viewed through the intersections of social reproduction and everyday finance (Karaagac, 2020). Roberts and Zulfiqar’s (2019) research on pawnbroking shows how gender, especially feminised labour, is vital to sustaining certain social relations of credit and economic survival. They also reflect on the gendered implications of the growing incursion of masculinised capitalist finance into spaces of everyday life, as such processes often result in the exclusion of women from financial relations even as it seeks to (re-)incorporate them into dominant forms of accumulation. In microfinance, for instance, women are often the target of the global microfinance industry claiming to empower them by providing loans for small business activities. However, research has shown how microfinance often reinforces the burden of development on women rather than alleviate poverty, with even more social productive labour required to manage family relations and budgets for loan repayment (Brickell et al., 2020; Green and Estes, 2019; Karim, 2011).

This link between Global South households, development and debt relations is increasingly driven by market actors and neoliberal financial logics that are shifting moral concerns about poverty from structural inadequacies over to the financial discipline and economic choices of individuals (Green, 2022; Guermond et al., 2025). Such dynamics are also evident in terms of race, such as in Datta and Aznar’s (2019) research on how debt shapes migration and financial lives of Somali, Brazilian, Cameroonian and Congolese migrants in London. These practices encompasses both informal and formal financial relations, ranging from loans through kinship and friendship networks to bank loans and credit card debts, including the creation of new formalised institutions like Rotating Savings and Credit Associations among migrants. These financial strategies involve complex social and emotional obligations entangled with formal money relations and demonstrate how racialised inequalities shape financial practices and relations for migrant communities. The intersections of race and migration, with their inherent marginalisation and vulnerabilities, often lead to specific framings of migrants as in need of interventions for financial inclusion but usually with unfavourable terms that render them even more vulnerable and indebted (Banta, 2025; Guermond, 2023; Simone and Walks, 2019). Remittances is a generative research topic related to everyday financial lives that draws together perspectives from finance, migration and development, although that is beyond the scope of this report (see Cirolia et al., 2022; Guermond, 2022a). These everyday lenses illustrate how everyday financial lives are deeply embedded in the social and emotional realities of family life, kinship ties and community networks, shaped by gendered responsibilities, racialised characteristics and reciprocal relationships.

Fintech

There is growing research on how fintech is shaping everyday financial practice and subjectivities variegated ways, characterised by the digitalisation of financial access, the reconfiguration of financial norms and behaviours and the extension of exploitative practices, particularly in the Global South and toward lower-income populations. The digital ubiquity of finance is altering the daily rhythms and materiality of money and finance. Through digital platforms and mobile devices, financial products and services are now increasingly woven into the fabric of everyday life through, for example, digital savings apps, neobanks or digital banks (Cockayne and Loomis, 2025; Lai and Langley, 2024), digital payment systems (Guermond, 2022b; Lai and Samers, 2021; Natile, 2020), wealth management apps and retail investing platforms (Chua, 2025; Tan, 2020, 2021). While some studies note that incumbent banks are making use of fintech to develop new organisational structures and market strategies (Lai, 2020; Santos, 2024), most research has tended to focus on new entrants, such as technology firms and start-ups, into the spaces of everyday finance and how they are reconfiguring financial relations and practices.

Cockayne and Loomis (2025) provide a useful overview on how fintech is shaping new habitual routines of daily life. The constant notifications and instant accessibility of financial services via mobile apps are influencing economic behaviour, changing the spatial and temporal dimensions of money and finance, and reconfiguring practices of lending and borrowing. In-app products and suggestions are highly customised to each user by using machine-learning tools to analyse user behaviour and demographics, omitting information that its algorithms deem irrelevant (Lai and Langley, 2024). As noted by Anderson et al. (2020), applications for payday loans have become easier through mobile apps but also evoke greater debt anxiety as the constant presence of devices intensifies repayment reminders from lenders. Another area of research has been driven by the growing popularity of ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ (BNPL) services (e.g. Klarna and Clearpay) (Aalders, 2023; Cook et al., 2023; Loomis and Cockayne, 2025; Tan, 2022; Threadgold et al., 2024). This service allows consumers to split payment for purchases into a few interest-free instalments and is especially attractive to cash-strapped consumers who may not qualify for formal credit (e.g. credit cards and bank overdraft). BNPL extends and multiplies the duration of everyday indebtedness by allowing users to shuffle and defer immediate repayment. As an option that is provided by fintechs (although banks are also expanding into this market), the blurring of boundaries between finance and technology has regulatory implications and consumption effects. There are on-going debates about how financial services by non-financial firms should be regulated and whether they should be marketed as just payment alternatives rather than a form of credit, which depoliticises debt and increased potential for consumer vulnerabilities especially for young adults and women consumers (Cook et al., 2023; Loomis and Cockayne, 2025). Research into the growing power of fintechs in everyday finance also raises an important question about whether this is a form of democratisation and decentralisation of finance or a form of recentralisation with platforms and digital providers acquiring new monopoly powers in shaping financial access and practices (Cockayne and Loomis, 2025; Gabor and Brooks, 2017).

Fintech serves as an important mechanism for producing financial subjectivities, often reinforcing the financialisation of everyday life through narratives and technologies that emphasise individual responsibility, risk-taking and calculative assessment in managing personal financial choices via digitalised financial offerings. Digitalisation of everyday finance can thus be conceptualised as another layer in technologies of Foucauldian governmentality (Gabor and Brooks, 2017; Aalders, 2023; Tan, 2025). Many services, particularly those marketed to young people, use gamified user interface and social media-like features to increase their appeal and encourage repeated and frequent user attention and engagement, often emphasising elements of fun, entertainment and aspirations (Ash et al., 2018; Lai, 2025; Lai and Langley, 2024; Liu et al., 2025). These design efforts to remove practical, affective or emotional ‘frictions’ encourage consumption and increased use of digital financial services. The combination of gamification, social media influencers (or ‘finfluencers’) and digital finance is becoming particularly important to the growing youth and young adult market (Lai, 2025), who are seen as digital natives and less likely to have loyalties to established banks. However, this raises concerns about the growing indebtedness of young people via BNPL services (Cook et al., 2023; Davidsson and Eriksson, 2025) and new risk populations via readily accessible investing platforms (Chua, 2025; Tan, 2021), which may include cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens in addition to regular stocks, shares and index funds (Wyeth et al., 2025; Yao, 2025). Age and gender are prominent characteristics with young women forming the largest customer base of BNPL services and the average age being lower than that of other financial products such as credit cards and personal loans (Cook et al., 2023). This reflects a wider ‘feminisation of finance’ (Allon, 2014) as the financial services industry has increasingly turned towards women as an under-tapped consumer market, construed as ideal financial subjects because they are deemed as cautious and risk averse when compared with men, in conjunction with feminised expectations about health, beauty and social reproductive roles (Cruickshank, 2023). Users are not necessarily compliant in adopting neoliberal investor subjectivities. Research highlights how users reconfigure fintech in complex and unexpected ways, exercising agency by repurposing platform relations for varied purposes that reflect rejection or scepticism towards the claims of fintech apps (Tan, 2022, 2025), often acting as ‘selectively self-directed digital-financial subject’ (Chua, 2025) in choosing. Studies in African and Indonesian cities, for instance, show that people make use of financial tools and digital platforms to create their own currencies, identities and desires, that are more than just the imposition of external capitalistic logics (Cirolia et al., 2024; Kusimba, 2025; Nowak, 2023).

Fintech often extends and deepens existing structural inequalities, particularly through debt mechanisms and data exploitation, creating new financial frontiers marked by racialised expropriation and neo-colonial relations. The persistence and renewal of colonialism is an important theme that has emerged from research on fintech and everyday finance in African economies (Bernards, 2022; Langley and Leyshon, 2022; Langley and Rodima-Taylor, 2022). Gabor and Brooks (2017) argue that a fintech–philanthropy–development complex has emerged through the use of mobile technologies to extract and monetise the user data. This harvesting of ‘digital footprints’ provides global finance with new ways of mapping and profiling low-income individuals and households in the Global South into generators of financial assets, often under the guise of financial inclusion (Jalal-Eddeen, 2024). Bhagat and Roderick (2020) argue that the use of fintech solutions for direct peer-to-peer aid transfers from the Global North to refugees is disrupting and subverting refugee assistance by deeming particular types of refugees worthy of aid (for instance, those who are deemed entrepreneurial in starting small businesses) while others are excluded.

Jalal-Eddeen’s (2024) research in Nigeria shows how fintech loans perpetuate an endless cycle of debt and dependency. When users default, companies employ algorithmic extortion as a disciplinary technique through libellous calls, slanderous text messages and defamation on social media. These lead to humiliation and regret with profound impacts on relationships and daily living. Langley and Leyshon (2022) highlight how data-driven credit scoring is used in various African contexts to enrol racially excluded populations but actually replicates the same colonial logics that had previously marked their exclusion. In her critique of the mobile money project M-Pesa in Kenya, Natile (2020) argues that fintech operates on logics of opportunity rather than politics of redistribution, which does not address the causes of gendered financial exclusion but rather enhances unequal power relations. Financial inclusion strategies mediated through fintech mask neo-colonial relations, corporate power and racialised and gendered narratives. Taken together, these growing strands of research on fintech and intersections with the daily necessities of living and livelihoods highlight the complexities, inequalities and unpredictability of consumer groups and geographical markets as financial frontiers in the fintech remediation of everyday finance.

Conclusion

Research on the everyday lives of finance has significantly expanded the horizons of financial geography, moving beyond firm- and state-centric analyses to illuminate how financial logics permeate the intimate spaces of households, care relations and daily routines. These approaches foreground the variegated subjectivities through which individuals encounter finance – not just as rational investors but as uncertain, affective and moral actors negotiating social expectations, aspirational goals and structural shifts in welfare provisions and wage conditions. These insights underscore the gendered, racialised and classed dimensions of financial practices, revealing how financialisation intersects with social reproduction and amplifies existing inequalities.

The rise of fintech adds further complexity, embedding financial products into the temporalities and materialities of everyday life while reconfiguring subjectivities through digital platforms, gamification and algorithmic governance. While often presented as opportunities for democratising finance, these technologies frequently reproduce exploitative relations, extend indebtedness and create new frontiers of data-driven extraction, particularly in the Global South. Such dynamics demand critical attention to the neo-colonial and racialised logics underpinning financial inclusion narratives.

Two areas of research stand out in terms of future directions: the relative neglect of age in finance research and the evolving entanglements between state and financial technologies. While there has been substantive research on gender and race, there has been little on age. The increasing importance of fintech and social media on everyday life and the gamification of financial practice have important implications for shaping new forms of everyday financial practice, not least for children and youths (Lai, 2025). At the same time, older people are increasingly victims of financial fraud, with perpetrators exploiting poor understandings of how financial transactions work in digital environments. As everyday financial practices become more closely tied to digital banking and fintech apps, the challenge of digital literacy should become even more important for understanding financial literacy and impacts on older (and younger) populations.

Concerns about the changing relationships between state and welfare have driven much of the research on financial subjects. In a similar vein, the increasing prominence of digitalisation and algorithmic technologies in finance could lead to growing research into changing relationships between state and fintech. These could include the regulation of fintechs and Big Tech firms (who mobilise vast amounts of data from their platform business to expand into finance), issues of technological sovereignty and data protection for financial consumers (Bassens et al., 2024; Chu, 2025; Chu et al., 2025). These geoeconomic and geopolitical shifts can have significant impacts on the financial practices, experience and vulnerabilities of everyday consumers.

Addressing these will require intersectional and multi-scalar approaches that situate everyday financial practices within broader political-economic transformations. By continuing to interrogate the lived, affective and digital dimensions of finance, financial geography can offer vital insights into how financialisation shapes not only economies but also the very conditions of life itself.