Can FinTech innovate Green Finance? Scrutinising the Platform Ecologies of FinTech for Forest Restoration

Green finance has struggled to make a difference in climate change mitigation.For some, the main limitations lie in scaling and diversifying financial flows and instruments to close the climate funding gap, while for others, green finance is fundamentally flawed as an incumbent-led project that opens new environmental frontiers for accumulation.In response, FinTech has been touted as offering the technological solutions that could both bridge the climate financing gap and disrupt the systemic issues green finance faces.Yet, critical voices question whether FinTech is simply the latest 'technological turn' in a long line of socioecological fixes, designed to reintermediate financial activity onto increasingly powerful FinTech platforms.To assess the potential for Fin-Tech to innovate green finance, we explore a suite of FinTech innovations aimed at enticing, incentivising, and thus mobilising retail consumers to fund tree planting for forest restoration as a means of delivering climate, biodiversity, and livelihood outcomes.Rooted in the award-winning Ant Forest innovation by Alibaba, we document eight subsequent variations of the Ant Forest model by different FinTech firms, who share the same focus on enabling consumer-funded tree plantingbut modify the initial innovation in various ways.By utilising a 'platform ecologies' framework, we reveal that these innovations have delivered significant environmental outputs, with these nine FinTechs collectively financing the planting of over 750 million trees, but that evidence of environmental impact in terms of tree survival and carbon sequestration rates, remains vague.Moreover, whilst these nine FinTechs offer novel green finance solutions, they are also fundamentally driven by platform development to increase users and revenuerather than environmental concern.