A new form of digital economic circulation has emerged, wherein ideas, knowledge, labour and use rights for otherwise idle assets move between geographically distributed but connected and interactive online communities. Such circulation is apparent across a number of digital economic ecologies, including social media, online marketplaces, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and other manifestations of the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Prevailing accounts deploy concepts such as ‘co-production’, ‘prosumption’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ to explain digital economic circulation as networked exchange relations characterised by their disintermediated, collaborative and democratising qualities. Building from the neologism of platform capitalism, we place ‘the platform’ — understood as a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of capitalisation — at the centre of the critical analysis of digital economic circulation. To create multi-sided markets and coordinate network effects, platforms enrol users through a participatory economic culture and mobilise code and data analytics to compose immanent infrastructures. Platform intermediation is also nested in the ex-post construction of a replicable business model. Prioritising rapid up-scaling and extracting revenues from circulations and associated data trails, the model performs the structure of venture capital investment which capitalises on the potential of platforms to realise monopoly rents.

The paper develops a sympathetic geographical critique of the concept of financialization which seeks to account for the growing influence of financial markets over the unfolding of economy, polity and society. Processes of financialization are claimed to be manifest at a number of scales, from higher levels of instability within the economy as a whole, through pressure exerted on corporations by capital markets, to the equity effects of the financial system on individuals and households. In seeking to explain change within contemporary society, financialization has circulated less widely than similar and related concepts such as neoliberalization. While financialization has the potential to unite researchers across cognate social science fields, thereby building critical mass and recognition within social studies of money and finance, we argue that research has been insufficiently attentive to space and place, both in terms of processes and effects. Financialization is a profoundly spatial phenomenon, representing as it does the search for a spatial-temporal fix, or quasi-resolution of the crisis tendencies of contemporary capitalism. The paper explores a number of possibly fruitful directions for work on financialization, focusing in particular on the idea of financial ecologies.

`A hopeful but nonetheless hard-hitting analysis of alternative economic spaces proliferating in the belly of the capitalist beast. In this book Leyshon, Lee

‘FinTech’ is the digital sector of retail money and finance widely proclaimed to be transforming banking in the global North and ‘banking the unbanked’ in the global South. This paper develops a perspective for critically understanding FinTech as a platform political economy that is marked by three distinctive and related processes: reintermediation, consolidation, and capitalisation. Through experimentation with the platform business model and building on the digital infrastructures and data flows of the broader platform ecosystem, a constellation of organisations – including start-ups, early-career firms, BigTech companies and incumbent banks – are engaged in processes of platform reintermediation. Changing the bases of competition in retail money and financial markets and encouraging oligopoly and even monopoly, the reintermediation processes of FinTech are presently manifest in strong tendencies towards platform consolidation. The imagined potential of FinTech has also triggered intensive processes of capitalisation, with platforms receiving significant prospective investment by venture capital, private equity funds, banks and BigTech firms.

The paper argues that the origins of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 can ultimately be located in four spaces: in international financial centres, in particular, in the longstanding competition that has existed between London and New York; in the insularity of the everyday geographies of money that have emerged in such centres in the wake of the apparent hegemony of financialization; in the geographical recycling of surpluses and deficits and, more particularly, the structural dependency that has grown up between China and the USA, and, finally; in the growing power of the financial media, centred in international financial centres and an increasingly significant agent in performing money and the economy in general, and in engendering mimetic forms of rationality.