This paper examines the roles of Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong as financial centres by utilising interview and secondary data to analyse the decision-making of financial and regulatory actors, and the different functional roles of foreign banks in those cities. Their intercity relations demonstrate a complex mix of competition and collaboration that embeds them in evolving networks of interdependence. Empirical findings indicate differentiated markets leading to the distinctive development of Shanghai as a commercial centre, Beijing as a political centre and Hong Kong as an offshore financial centre, with all three financial centres performing distinctive and complementary roles within the regional banking strategies of foreign banks. The analysis first explains Hong Kong’s continued dominance in the region and, secondly, reveals insights into changing intercity relationships between these prominent Chinese cities that contribute to their distinctive development as financial centres.

While successful in its aim of 'globalizing' regional development, the Global Production Network (GPN) approach has thus far paid less attention to the role of finance in the dynamics of the global economy and regional development. This lacuna is significant as finance is arguably even more globalised and networked than production. To address this gap the paper distills the concept of the Global Financial Network (GFN) from financial geography and related scholarship, with advanced business services, world cities, and offshore jurisdictions at the core. Interactions between the GPN and the GFN are discussed, focusing on the financing and financializing of GPNs and the co-evolution of globalization and financialisation. Integrating finance into GPN research entails more than a simple extension of the approach; it would also enrich it conceptually, and enable it methodologically and empirically.

While successful in its aim of 'globalizing' regional development, the Global Production Network (GPN) approach has thus far paid less attention to the role of finance in the dynamics of the global economy and regional development. This lacuna is significant as finance is arguably even more globalised and networked than production. To address this gap the paper distills the concept of the Global Financial Network (GFN) from financial geography and related scholarship, with advanced business services, world cities, and offshore jurisdictions at the core. Interactions between the GPN and the GFN are discussed, focusing on the financing and financializing of GPNs and the co-evolution of globalization and financialisation. Integrating finance into GPN research entails more than a simple extension of the approach; it would also enrich it conceptually, and enable it methodologically and empirically.

While recent work on financialisation of everyday life has elucidated the reshaping of everyday consumers as risk‐taking investors, the role of financial advisors (FAs) has been overlooked, even though they are key intermediaries in articulating households and individuals into circuits of global finance. Through a financial ecologies approach, this paper focuses on FAs to reveal the ambiguities and inconsistencies inherent in their professional practice as varied modes of corporate management and organisational practices lead to differentiated encounters that shape the financial knowledge and investment decisions of clients. Empirical analysis is based on industry reports, regulatory documents, personal interviews and ethnographic fieldwork at professional training and networking events. The findings demonstrate how professional intermediaries like FAs are vital in explaining the shifting and uneven configuration of investor subjects. A critical analysis of FAs reveals how the decision making process and investment practices of consumers are fraught with knowledge asymmetries and embedded in distinctive financial ecologies with variegated outcomes. The ecologies concept is mobilised to explain the resilience or fragility of relational formations, the entanglement of diverse elements and motivations in the variegated formation of investor subjects, and the operation of constitutive ecologies within the financial system.

Existing studies on financialisation have used Foucauldian governmentality to examine how everyday consumers, shaped by state initiatives and proliferation of financial products, are transforming into self-reliant subjects capable of seeking out financial knowledge and products for future security. By bringing the idea of agencement into critical dialogue with governmentality, this paper incorporates lived and emotive elements of quotidian financial practices with political economic and organisational dimensions of market behaviour to uncover a broad bandwidth of financial subjectivities. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with investors and participant observation at financial literacy events to explore financial knowledge and practices of everyday investors in Singapore. Findings reveal how intimacies, moralities and technologies are mobilised and entangled such that logics of financial governmentality could operate through multiple registers, harnessed for different means and with varied outcomes.