Mobile money as an interface between finance and livelihood

Digital payment tools and mobile money receive growing attention as a possible tool for alleviating poverty and expanding the benefits of market economies. Especially the Kenyan product M-Pesa gained prominence, since Suri and Jack (2016) published a study according to which it paved a way out of poverty for 2% of the country’s households. However, there are more skeptical notions, too. This debate is now gets a good basis in the long-term ethnographic study by Sibel Kusimba. She endows the conflicting assessments with differentiated reports on the contexts of M-Pesa usage in the Kenyan society

The value of transactions in the new data economy

Along with tools for video-calls, cashless payment has been among one of the technologies that gained new momentum during the global pandemic. While paying with a credit or debit card has been an everyday practice for some time, mobile and contactless payments are increasingly welcome and used in many Western countries. However, most of these new payment technologies are not necessarily developed by banks, and more often stem from the so-called Big Tech companies (PayPal, Apple, Google, Amazon). The question of how money alters its meaning with the way that it is circulated lies at the heart of Lana Swartz’s book, New Money: How Payment Became Social Media

Cashlessness in India: Vision, policy and practices

Over the past few years, an increasing convergence can be observed between international and Indian initiatives towards cashlessness, often involving a broad range of actors and influences. Despite this convergence, it is also clear that the conceptualization and implementation, or goals and outcomes of cashlessness can vary considerably, which indicates the need for a closer look at the Indian case. In this introductory note to the special issue on cashlessness in India, we outline the variety of institutions, stakeholders (regulatory, financial and technological actors), technologies and policies involved. As we have observed, digital payments and financial inclusion are two significant planks of cashlessness in India. Perhaps as a result, digital payments have been intentionally defined in a broad manner in India – ranging from anti-cash to less-cash and now contactless payments in the aftermath of Covid-19. Considering the variety of legal, economic, social and technological concerns involved, this special issue adopts 2 complementary foci to study cashlessness in India: technological visions and the systems undergirding it, and practices of end users. The special issue includes four papers. The first paper argues that the Digital India programme may lead to the commercialization of bias. The second paper historicizes the Indian demonetization of 2016 and examines its stated and unstated goals. The next paper provides a conceptual model on technology adoption in the context of digital payments. The final paper argues that users strategically switch between multiple payments media based on the context in which the transaction is taking place

Self-funded social impact investment: an interdisciplinary analysis of the Sardex mutual credit system

Sardex is an electronic B2B mutual credit system that has been operating on the island of Sardinia since 2009 as a complementary currency. In contrast to other funding mechanisms, it allows private funding driving social and environmental impact to be endogenously generated within a given geographically limited socio-economic context, rather than injected from exogenous sources. By drawing on different strands of monetary theory, sociology and anthropology, we argue that mutual credit is central to a form of social finance and social impact investment that we identify with sustainable development, i.e. stable and constructive integration of market activity with democratic institutions and socio-cultural values and structures. The empirical basis of the paper consists of approximately thirty semi-structured in-depth interviews of Sardex circuit members and founders over 4 years. We conclude that Sardex as a collective social enterprise is best understood through an interdisciplinary perspective that demonstrates its sustainability through the different levels of its workings and its strengths as a hybrid multilayered system

Capitalizing on the crowd: The monetary and financial ecologies of crowdfunding

‘Crowdfunding’ is a method of raising money and finance to capitalize projects of various kinds. Drawing on the networking capabilities of the internet and software platforms, those seeking project funding appeal to potentially diverse audiences who are collectively referred to as ‘the crowd’. What practitioners, advocates and policymakers typically identify within crowdfunding is its ‘alternative’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘democratizing’ qualities; that is, it is held to be a novel, digitally rendered economic space which has the capacity to challenge established funding practices in banking, capital markets and venture capital networks, offering a more open and egalitarian source of capital for economic, social and cultural entrepreneurship. The paper develops the concept of ‘ecologies’, drawn from the geographies of money and finance literature, to advance a critical understanding of the crowdfunding economy that is sceptical of its apparent qualities. First, by encouraging the analysis of diverse and proliferative monetary and financial forms, the concept of ecologies enables an understanding that avoids the binary opposition of ‘capitalist/alternative’ economic forms and which differentiates between the variegated crowdfunding ecologies that have emerged to date. Second, by foregrounding the intermediation processes and credit–debt relations of monetary and financial ecologies, it is argued that crowdfunding may largely replicate rather than disrupt the extant institutional and debt dynamics of funding practices. Third, by emphasizing the socio-spatial effects of monetary and financial ecologies, attention is drawn to the need for further research into the unevenness that mitigates against crowdfunding being as open and egalitarian as its advocates claim

The Ascent of Plastic Money:The International Adoption of the Bank Credit Card, 1950-1975

This article studies the genesis and early international expansion of the bank-issued credit card—an American innovation that quickly took hold in western Europe. Empirical evidence undermines the proposition of a single firm building a proprietary network. In fact, it was a constellation of participants that combined three characteristics, namely, a critical mass of both retail customers and retail merchants; the capacity to implement new technological solutions; and the ability to forge resilient collaborations across national borders. The evidence supports the value of collaboration in retail financial services as means of appropriating network externalities. Moreover, other conceptual and empirical studies, especially those based on two-sided markets, neglect the greater implications that initial conditions in this industry have on long-term success

Entrevista com Bill Maurer

Bill Maurer (foto: Kristen Salisbury). Bill Maurer é um importante antropólogo norte-americano, professor de Antropologia, Direito e Criminologia, Direito e Sociedade; pró-reitor de Ciências Sociais e diretor do Instituto para Inclusão Financeira, Dinheiro e Tecnologia (Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion – IMTFI) na Universidade da Califórnia em Irvine. Entre seus interesses de pesquisa estão questões de dinheiro e moral, finanças e moedas alternativas, bancos islâmicos,..

Entrevista com Bill Maurer

Bill Maurer (foto: Kristen Salisbury). Bill Maurer é um importante antropólogo norte-americano, professor de Antropologia, Direito e Criminologia, Direito e Sociedade; pró-reitor de Ciências Sociais e diretor do Instituto para Inclusão Financeira, Dinheiro e Tecnologia (Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion – IMTFI) na Universidade da Califórnia em Irvine. Entre seus interesses de pesquisa estão questões de dinheiro e moral, finanças e moedas alternativas, bancos islâmicos,..