In February 2021, Marie Ekeland, one of the most influential figures in the French FinTech sector, set out the ambition for her new funding vehicle 2050 – designed to have a long-term positive impact on issues like equality and sustainability – in the following way:

In the absence of an overarching and positive vision of how to build a better world collectively through formal democratic processes, and with the future appearing to promise little more than an endless series of world-ending threats to be managed in order to mitigate their most harmful effects, Ekeland struck a more optimistic note in the same article with a very simple but profound observation: ‘Money is actually very powerful but it has to have a destination … If finance is only reproducing the past, then we’re not going to find any solutions to the current new challenges that we have because people do not know how to solve them.’

The story that finance likes to tell about itself, at least since the entrepreneurial turn of the 1980s, is that it is at the cutting edge of innovation. It is certainly true that the plethora of new financial products that have emerged onto the market, especially since the internet revolution of the 2000s, have become increasingly complex and fantastical in their ability to evade popular understanding and thus any real democratic accountability. But what is striking about Ekeland's observation from the very epicentre of the financial innovation sector is how little all of this Promethean creativity has contributed to the betterment of society. Indeed, by ‘only reproducing the past’, finance for all its innovation has too often simply maintained the injustices of the status quo. Far from the radical liberator that appears in fairy tales told by and about the sector, mainstream financial innovation has largely exaggerated and entrenched existing inequalities and had a devastating impact on the natural environment.