FinTech as a state-orchestrated strategy: redefining financialization of households in Argentina

Abstract

This article examines how longstanding asymmetries in Argentina’s financial system have shaped the adoption and expansion of fifinancial technologies (FinTech). Rather than signaling a rupture from past institutional trajectories, FinTech emerge as a contingent response to persistent failures in the country’s financial inclusion agenda. It analyzes how structural inequalities and historical mistrust have conditioned FinTech’s emergence, and how the Argentine state has selectively supported this process through regulatory frameworks and infrastructural interventions. Drawing on official data from the IMF, World Bank, Bank for International Settlements, and Central Bank of Argentina, complemented by qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2023 in Buenos Aires, the study argues that FinTech represents an institutional adaptation that reorganises financial inclusion along stratified lines. Central to this argument is the reconfiguration of inclusion as differentiated exposure to new forms of financial intermediation, a process in which access to savings and credit is structured byinflationary pressures, labour informality, and regulatory segmentation. In this configuration, financial participation is enabled by new infrastructures, yet remains conditional, precarious, and uneven. Ultimately, FinTech’s expansion reflects a strategic repurposing through neoliberal governance, selectively integrating households as financial subjects while enduring longstanding contradictions in Argentina’s financial landscape.