Taking Time to Adapt

CONCEPCION, Colombia

A new report from the online news and popular culture channel Fusion, explains the pros and cons of mobile money and why uptake is slow in Concepcion, Colombia.

Manuel Rueda/Fusion

"Although the system provides clear benefits, such as facilitating the transfer of remittance money to relatives in far-off villages where banks don’t exist, it usually takes time for people to adapt to the new technology. It’s particularly tough to promote mobile money in places where it’s not used regularly to pay salaries...." Read on.

It's all in the wrist!

The imprinter gestural system, otherwise known as "the swipe" in payment transactions, is on its way out according to our Director, Bill Maurer. Check out the featured article over at Visa's tumblr.

"Anyone remember the knuckle-buster or zip-zap machines as they were called? Those old credit card imprinters made by companies like Farrington Manufacturing (now defunct) and Addressograph (still in business and making military dog tags). If you were a merchant, you used it like this: you placed a sales slip, made with carbon paper, into the device along with your customer’s credit card. The device had an embossed metal plate containing your business’s account and address information. With a right-left swipe of the handle, it would mark all of the information needed to initiate and verify a transaction...."

IMTFI Spring 2015 Newsletter

We've put together the Spring 2015 newsletter so that you can hear all about our work this year and share it with your friends! From the IMTFI “special sauce” of capacity building, collaborative mentoring and research dissemination, to Guardian Forums, to online webinars, we have been super busy. So check out all of our work in this handy summary.
Oh, and don't forget to watch our video!

Professor Nigel Thrift Audio Recording on Calculation and Error

By IMTFI Graduate Research Assistant, Nandita Badami

"Stops mistakes, saves money, speeds
service to customers!" -
National Cash Register Company Ad 1955
from the IMTFI archives

As computational systems get more sophisticated, the assumption that calculation errors will get progressively eliminated is one we all tend to make. In this short video, noted human geographer Nigel Thrift briefly reflects on how this is not always the case. Prompted by an image from the IMTFI archives - a ‘National’ cash register advertisement from 1955 - Professor Thrift reflects on the importance of remembering the persistence of calculation errors within increasingly automated monetary systems.

Read more on Professor Thrift’s work on “qualculation” - the many millions of calculations that inform any given social encounter in Euro-American cultures.

This is the second in a series of short videos on the material cultures of payment and money started by the blog Transactions: A Payments Archive. You can view the first video, a commentary by Professor Keith Hart (Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the London School of Economics) on the Kina Shell necklace and its connections to the history of anthropological thinking about money, gifts and exchange, here.

The full audio recording of Nigel Thrift's talk, "Cities in the Anthropocene" held at UC Irvine on Feb. 26, 2015, is available on the IMTFI YouTube site.

*These videos feature excerpts from the song “Jupiter the Blue” by Gillicuddy, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 International license.

How to address the stubborn gender gap in banking across the globe

New Guardian report on gender and economic empowerment

"Despite Herculean efforts from nonprofits, banks and economists, the gender gap between male and female bank account ownership persists."

With the help of Women’s World Banking, Nigeria’s Diamond Bank 
launched a savings account so women in Nigeria can open 
a savings account using mobile phones. Photograph: Johnny Greig/Alamy

"Women who open a bank account gain greater economic empowerment, save more for things such as health emergencies and their children’s education, and purchase more nutritious food. So says Leora Klapper, a lead economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank. Yet, while nonprofits, banks, and researchers have made serious strides, the data convincingly (and discouragingly) still shows far fewer women than men own a bank account and far fewer women than men use formal credit."

"The numbers show the truth. The 2011 Global Findex Data (which Klapper co-authored) reports 97% of adults in the United Kingdom possess accounts and equally between men and women. In other developed countries, 90% of men and women possess a bank account. In Nigeria, however, where 33% of adults possess an account, only 26% of account owners are women. Even within the richest 20% of earners in developing countries, a striking 9% gender gap in bank account ownership remains."

Mary Ellen Iskenderian who heads Women’s World Banking, discusses a nonprofit working with banks in developing countries to bridge the gender gap, says part of their work is convincing financial service companies that women are indeed excellent clients. “With small tweaks, specific to design and marketing, banks can easily tailor their products to women,” she says.

Read the full post by DG McCullough here.

IMTFI video - What do we do?

By IMTFI Graduate Research Assistant, Nathan Dobson

The IMTFI team with the help of Steve McCord, a freelance videographer, have made an introductory video to our work. We are really quite proud of it so please send it to your friends and family and click, click, click to get the number of views up.

December was an especially busy month for the IMTFI team as we shot the video around the time of the sixth annual conference. Steve set up shop in our offices for a few days before the conference in order to capture some of our work. He took pictures and film of us in action and gathered data on our archives and collection of money artifacts. The excellent production of the film speaks to the amount that he learnt about us in a short space of time.

There have already been a number of exciting developments since the video. Graduate student researcher, Stevie Rea has made a roundup blog post bringing together different strands of the interviews that he conducted over the course of the conference. The videographer, Steve McCord has since been invited by a number of our researchers to do collaborative projects with them in their fields. And the video has already been viewed and shared by researchers and interested parties from Borneo to Birmingham. So sit back and enjoy the show!

To see other IMTFI-related videos visit the IMTFI YouTube site.

Interactive Webinar Recap with Professor Kusimba and M-Changa

In a truly interactive webinar with live questions and live polls, the NetHope Payment Innovations team hosted IMTFI Fellow Professor Sibel Kusimba and CEO Kyai Mullei & Rajan Trivedi from the Kenyan startup M-Changa on a panel titled, “Mobile Money, The Social Network Effect, and Philanthropy - Recent Research from Kenya and Product Innovation From M-Changa.” The webinar recap "A Glimpse into Future of Mobile Money Societies in the Global South" and recording of the webinar are now available.
 

Presentations by Professor Kusimba and M-Changa.

Professor Kusimba offers an anthropological perspective with her research. She found that the use of mobile money in western Kenya is evenly split among three categories: urgent needs, everyday expenses, and social payments. She was surprised to discover that some of the most profound emotions people have were closely connected to sending mobile money.

“What really struck me was just how important mobile money is not just as an economic support network or practice, but as an important cultural and social practices as well. People use these remittances of mobile money to express their close relationships – especially to people who are geographically dispersed,” she said.

Professor Kusimba offered an illuminating metaphor for the fusion of traditional culture with mobile money. She observed a coming of age celebration in which the boy used his phone to receive donations from friends and family in addition to traditional gifts (e.g. livestock, prepared meal prepared) – an interesting mix of the traditional practices combined with new mobile money practices used to bring the family together.

“What this says to me is that people don’t necessarily want to stop doing what they’re doing and do something new, rather, they want to keep doing what they’re doing, but they want new capabilities and new, better, more efficient ways of doing what they’re already doing and value,” she said.

Read more on the NetHope roundup and listen to additional research insights that build the impetus for financial inclusion tools like those provided by M-Changa, an end-to-end mobile fundraising management platform that takes M-PESA to the next level and allows users to create and manage fundraisers using mobile phones and SMS.

10 barriers to boosting inclusive growth - Bill Maurer in conversation on The Guardian

On 26 Feb, IMTFI Director Bill Maurer livechatted on a panel, "Can mobile technology be a catalyst for inclusive growth?"(scroll down for full text of chat) with other mobile money experts in a Guardian series on Inclusive Growth, which is supported by MasterCard.

The idea of the chat which involved members from Policy Exchange, CGAP, TechChange, the Better than Cash Alliance, and other organizations, was to understand how mobile technology can help fight inequality and boost inclusive growth.

Here is a roundup of the "10 barriers to using mobile technology to fight inequality" to whet your appetite for more:

1. Phone charging 
2. Lack of personal ID 
3. Literacy and language
4. Lack of partnerships
5. Focus on technology not people
6. Gender inequality
7. Misunderstanding local need
8. Lack of digital skills
9. Complex regulatory frameworks
10. Poorer communities have been ignored 

Fall Newsletter

It’s been a busy year for financial inclusion, mobile money, and IMTFI. Our latest newsletter has a wrap-up on all our work on money, technology, and financial inclusion. With 21 new projects funded in 2014, we now have a total of 123 projects in 41 countries, with support for over 160 researchers since our founding in 2008. Our researchers have published new books, tons of articles and reports, and are exploring new formats for the dissemination of their research results as well as for the provision of financial education. Take a look at our new executive summary of our research to date on gender and financial inclusion, "Snapshots of Gender and Financial Inclusion". We were also recognized by The Guardian as one of the top ten financial inclusion Twitter streams—so, if you’re not doing so already, please follow us!

More...

If you didn't get the newsletter sent to your inbox but would like future notifications you can subscribe here. 

Bitcoin in Africa with Bill Maurer

A 3D printed Bitcoin.
Photo credit: Don Patterson

Ahead of his online summer session course "Barter to Bitcoin," Bill Maurer, social sciences dean and anthropology and law professor, has been featured in a podcast on The Bitcoin Lawyer April 27, 2014.

Dr. Bill Maurer, Director of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion at UC Irvine, talks about his work on mobile currencies in developing countries in Africa and how Bitcoin can allow people in those countries to transfer money without access to traditional banking institutions.

Listen to the full podcast.

What can ethnography contribute to microfinance research?

IMTFI researcher, Erin B. Taylor gets qualitative in her latest blog on ethnography and microfinance:

Money costs

"A problem with microfinance is that profit margins have to be very narrow to keep costs down.

If prices rises even a little, the world’s poorest people–for whom these products are intended–will not be able to afford them. This is why it is often necessary to keep a product range simple...

Private/public partners

"Where a market alone cannot support a product, non-profit funders (such as NGOs and multilateral development banks) may step in to provide support. This has been the case with both microcredit and mobile money, both of which are profit / non-profit hybrids....

Getting qualitative

"Qualitative research, such as ethnography, can reveal patterns of behaviour that we never would have expected. The best example of this that I have come across in recent times is David Stoll’s study of a Guatemalan village, described in his 2013 book “El Norte or Bust!: How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin American Town.”

Read on.