As Carney (2017), Governor of the Bank of England and Chair of Financial Stability Board hedged his bet on the post-crisis promises of FinTech in transforming financial intermediation towards a more efficient and competitive payments system, and credit and capital allocation in global economy both regulators (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, 2016) and investors (Financial Times, May 26, 2016) are cautiously enthusiastic about FinTech. Economic geographers Langley and Leyshon (2016) are amongst the critical academics who question both the novelty and the disruptive character of this “digitally-rendered economic space”. The demise of traditional bank intermediation and its replacement by an innovative system of finance have been constantly predicted by mainstream economics and finance since the early days of financialisation (see for example Finnerty 1992, Merton 1995, Tufano 2003, and Bernanke 2007). The 2007 crisis, however, has seriously dented the promises of financial innovation. In this paper I will argue that FinTech embodies more of conjunctural asset class characteristics in the post-crisis financialised capitalism where stock markets rather than product markets determine innovation. Post-crisis capital constraints in de-risking and re-capitalising bank intermediaries (Ertürk 2016) coupled with widening successful use of block-chain technology in payments (Maurer 2015) have opened up a space both for regulators and yield-searching investors to develop a narrative to legitimise a new asset class, FinTech, that is more likely to disappoint in channelling capital and credit to productive economy than to prove to be a disruptive technology with positive characteristics to replace the existing post-crisis dysfunctional financial intermediaries. FinTech also reveals the cognitive weaknesses of post-crisis financial regulation because regulatory mapping of the shadow banking (Financial Stability Board 2011, Claessens et al. 2012, etc.), which sees unregulated financial intermediation as a systemic risk, is mute about the systemic risks in FinTech-driven disintermediation.
