Banking in the cloud: mapping big tech’s global digital technology networks

Witnessing the inroads of big tech into finance, this paper maps the growing dependence of incumbent banks on public cloud infrastructures. Although ‘cloud interfacing’ has become crucial amid platform finance, the intersections between what we conceptualise as global digital technology networks and global financial networks have received little attention. We mobilise social network analysis to map: (1) the geographically variegated patterns of public cloud adoption in banking and their geopolitical implications; (2) the corporate networks supporting banks’ cloud migration; and (3) the urban networks of command and control undergirding cloud banking, connecting established financial centres with tech valleys old and new.