Criminal extortion and protection fees have emerged as significant threats to the sustainability of township businesses in South Africa, undermining entrepreneurship, formalisation, investment, and local economic development. While FinTech has transformed financial inclusion and digital transactions globally, its potential to disrupt cash-based extortion economies and strengthen the resilience of township enterprises remains largely unexplored. This paper investigates how FinTech innovations, including blockchain-enabled payment systems, mobile money, digital payment technologies, and complementary community-based digital platforms, can enhance economic resilience by reducing vulnerabilities associated with cash-based transactions and extortion. Drawing on the diffusion of innovation theory, this qualitative systematic literature review examined the opportunities, challenges, and institutional conditions influencing the adoption of these technologies within township economies. The findings suggest that FinTech innovations have the potential to reduce cash dependency, enhance transaction transparency, strengthen financial inclusion, improve collective reporting mechanisms, and build community resilience against extortion networks. However, their effectiveness depends on complementary investments in digital literacy, affordable digital infrastructure, institutional trust, enabling regulatory frameworks, and multi-stakeholder collaboration. The paper contributes to digital governance and FinTech scholarship by reframing technology adoption not only as a financial inclusion strategy but also as a governance mechanism that can enhance transparency, accountability, collective reporting, and economic security within vulnerable local economies. It further demonstrates how FinTech-enabled digital financial ecosystems can support the long-term sustainability of township economies through enhanced business resilience, secure digital transactions, and inclusive local economic development.

Criminal extortion and protection fees have emerged as significant threats to the sustainability of township businesses in South Africa, undermining entrepreneurship, formalisation, investment, and local economic development. This study examines how FinTech and complementary digital technologies may reduce the vulnerabilities associated with cash-based transactions while supporting longer-term economic resilience. It presents a qualitative systematic literature review of evidence published between 2016 and 2026, drawn from Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and supplemented by AI-assisted searching. The search yielded 8704 records, of which 114 were assessed in full-text and 48 were included in the final synthesis. The findings indicate that mobile money, digital payments, and blockchain-enabled systems may reduce cash dependency, improve transaction transparency and security, and strengthen financial participation. Complementary digital reporting and community platforms may further support collective responses to extortion. The review also identified a potential longer-term pathway from digital transaction records to greater financial visibility and formal financial participation; however, digital adoption does not automatically produce access to credit or eliminate extortion. Diffusion of innovation theory is used to explain how relative advantages, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability shape adoption. The study contributes to a governance-oriented FinTech framework in which digital payment adoption is understood as both a financial inclusion mechanism and a potential risk-reduction and formalisation pathway that could influence the sustainability of businesses. Its effectiveness depends on digital literacy, affordable infrastructure, institutional trust, enabling regulation, and multi-stakeholder collaboration.