There’s hype, there’s reality, and there’s possibility around all the cashlessness claims that follow on the heels of mobile and other digital payment platforms. We want to conclude our guest blogging with a gesture toward some of the possibilities of mobile money--and a challenge for the Credit Slips community.The last of the Maurer and Rea guest posts is up over at Credit Slips, along with a short roundup by Katie Porter.
As Janet Arnado, one IMTFI researcher, notes: "Informal wealth storing strategies exclusive of formal or informal financial institutions may always be practiced by the rural poor in the developing world, side by side with people’s utilization of financial institutions, because these practices have social dimensions as much as it has economic significance." At a Buddhist temple in Seattle, devotees build money trees to raise funds; in Ghana, brides are showered with money on their wedding day (they used to use Ghanaian currency but when it was redenominated, they could no longer afford bills. Rather than pelt the bride with coins, they switched to Nigerian naira).Click here to read it!
Much has been written about the inherent riskiness of cash. It is dangerous because it can be lost, stolen, eaten, destroyed, etc. It is dangerous because it is difficult to track, thereby helping to facilitate crime. Many a potboiler plot hinges on a cache of unmarked bills. Anyone remember Trixie Belden? “‘That governess of yours won’t argue when I tell her to leave a fat roll of unmarked bills under a stone at the Autoville entrance tonight. She won’t notify the police either.’ He reached up a grimy hand and touched one of Honey’s shoulder-length curls. ‘Not when I send her a lock of your pretty hair with the note, eh?’” (Julie Campbell, Trixie Belden and the Red Trailer Mystery, New York: Random House Children’s Books, 1950, p.180).Click here to read the rest!
