Infrastructures for Financial Inclusion in South Asia

One of the key promises of fintech has been to use digital identification to enhance development interventions. Fintech firms are increasingly collaborating with financial institutions, development organizations, and philanthropic foundations that enhance access to the financial system through digital identity databases. As a result, financial inclusion strategies have come to be heavily reliant on digital infrastructures. These infrastructures are a product of global and local shifts in development strategy, which is increasingly aligned with an international security agenda. To explain this, this chapter studies the actors, objects, and processes essential to these infrastructures. It uses examples from India and Pakistan to show how these infrastructures have their roots in the KYC or know-your-customer requirement that policymakers use biometric databases to implement. These examples reveal how tools initially intended to enhance financial access became foundational to the broader issue of social policy.