ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the rise of two related but distinct concepts about the organization of the financial system that each take their inspiration from ideas developed within the natural sciences: financial ecologies and financial ecosystems. The concepts of financial ecosystems and financial ecologies take their inspiration from ideas first developed in the latter domain; that is, of biology, evolution, and ecology. The power of the ecosystem as a concept for both describing and explaining contemporary business practices is its perceived flexibility, which is most often used to express both ‘a spatial logic and a level of relational interactivity’. The concept of financial ecology was first developed as part of ongoing research into the geographies of financial exclusion. The concept of the financial ecology seeks to draw an analogy between the organization of retail financial services and ecosystems, whereby certain arrangements emerge that are reproducible over time.
