Banks and Credit

This chapter examines the academic contributions and policy impacts economic geographers have made to understanding the geographical processes inherent in banking operations and practices, and shows why exploring banking and consumer credit is important. It discusses the roles and relationships between banks and citizens through consumer credit. Since the 1990s, geographers have been at the forefront of research around banking and credit, particularly financial exclusion. Advances in information communication technologies enabled telephone- and internet-based banking, centralizing credit decision-making, thereby replacing the need for more expensive and time consuming face-to-face, in-branch relationship banking. Inclusive credit scoring attempts to add value to traditional credit scoring models by making new forms of data available so that individuals can access affordable and fair sources of credit. Economic geographers have been at the forefront of research on the uneven geographies of finance and consumer credit since the 1970s, providing nuanced understandings of consumer credit landscape and solutions that enable policy-makers to address financial exclusion.