City Research Online

Abstract

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.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Finance and Society Network. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press or the rights holder(s) must be obtained prior to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article.
Publisher Keywords:	digital finance, fintech, futurity, sociology of finance, technofinance
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HG Finance H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Department of International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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