Digital Financial Colonialism

Digital finance is widely promoted as a pathway to financial inclusion, economic empowerment,and development across the Global South. This paper challenges such narrativesby arguing that fintech-led inclusion has generated a new form of structural dependencybest described as Digital Financial Colonialism. Drawing on theories of data colonialism,surveillance capitalism, and critical political economy, the paper conceptualiseshow externally owned digital financial infrastructures enable data extraction, algorithmicgovernance, and the erosion of economic and data sovereignty. It develops a conceptualframework identifying three core mechanisms: data extraction and external value capture,algorithmic governance of credit and risk, and structural dependency arising from platformdominance. The analysis demonstrates that inclusion focused primarily on access, withoutownership, data rights, and regulatory capacity, risks reproducing extractive relationshipsin digital form. The paper concludes that digital financial inclusion, if poorly governed,may deepen inequality and constrain policy autonomy, and calls for development strategiesthat prioritise data sovereignty, algorithmic accountability, and domestic institutionalcapacity.