Jan Chipchase at CGAP Clients at the Center

by IMTFI External Advisory Board member Jan Chipchase

Getting A Shave: Lagos, Nigeria by Jan Chipchase

What struck me about the recent CGAP Clients at the Center Convening Event in Washington DC on December 1, 2011 was the extent to which its focus  – to better understand customers, to turn customer insights into something that meaningfully changes the products/services being offered – is echoed by the challenges faced by our commercial clients. 

Pretty much every organisation recognises the need to understand their customers – whether it's to better serve their existing needs; deliver new products and services; or slightly less charitably to understand how responsive they are going to be to changes in price. There are many ways to gain a rich and nuanced understanding of the customer – and increasingly people are turning to rich ethnographic studies to compliment more data driven approaches. 

For consumer research to be impactful it needs to: have a clear client in the organisation – someone with a stake in its outcome; it needs to be soluble – in a format fit for consumption; and most importantly needs to inform and inspire the organisation beyond what it knows. Basic I know, but so-often missing when the person commissioning the research or the team that implements it lacks imagination and the willingness to put themselves on the line. Good research will communicate basic drivers, segmentation models, can reframe the value proposition; all the way through to the positioning of the brand. This is only part of the story – the organisation needs to be structured in such a way to take advantage of what they learn – the decision makers need to be in the room to absorb and act on the results.

The IMTFI is funding new projects – looking forward to researchers pushing the boundaries for another year.

CGAP Deputy CEO, Alexia Latortue has a full write-up of the event.

Funny Money Roundup 2

Another roundup of funny money, courtesy of IMTFI research assistant Taylor Nelms:

• I’m currently doing research in Quito, Ecuador, and after being mugged on a previous trip, I started putting a folded $20 or $10 bill in my shoe to have a bit of cash for a taxi if it happens again.

Now I know what to call it. Learn about the history of “mad money.” (h/t Eva)

Liz Losh's Guest Blog: Desires and Needs

As Director Bill Maurer wrapped up the annual conference about Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion at UC Irvine, he thanked the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and discussed how the donor and aid communities were adapting to collaborations with the investment community. He also said that the profits associated with a "world of fees and commissions" should be understood in relationship to the products and practices of "cultural worlds." Like landlord and tenant relationships, mobile money relationships often do not function with "free agents in an open market," even though ideologies of freedom and openness may be featured in advertising and project reports. Maurer argued that "researching the interface" and developing "different kinds of vocabularies" were important areas for systematic research.

Maurer showed some of the illustrations gathered by Jane Guyer in her project documenting Wikipedia's illustrations of the entry on "Market." Although he showed farmers displaying cabbage and the London corn exchange from Guyer's collection, he argued that conventional representations of a market as a site that sets price through supply and demand was little more than a nostalgic imaginary construction that did little to foster understanding of how mobile money actually operates. As he said, "the world of fees and commissions is coming into contact with a social world with things that look like this but aren't." Instead, he asserted that refugee camps might be the best example of the general concepts discussed at the conference, as the image of a Somali refugee camp replaced the commercial and pastoral images shown earlier. As Maurer put it, "let's pluralize 'the market' into multiple intersecting circuits of finance."

In discussing behavior change around mobile money, Maurer also insisted that it was important not to overlook "the importance of fun and enjoyment," because it was "easy to think of the poor as just having needs and not having desires." He also reminded audience members that "the poor don't aspire to be entrepreneurs necessarily" and encouraged them to think about Melissa Cliver's work on "economies of enoughness."

Liz Losh's Guest Blog: Design is More Than Copy and Paste

In the final panel of the annual IMFTI conference on "Mobile Money: Lessons for Microfinance and Design" moderator Paul Dourish emphasized how the shift in thinking from "user-centered design" to "design-centered use" could be applied to mobile money systems. (The video above shows mobile phone operated vending machines in China.)

The first talk on the "Impact of Mobile Money Services on Microfinance Institutions by Patricia Pulido, Maricruz LaCalle, and Casey Conzett focused on an analysis of operational costs in Tanzania, where they said mobile money services were not developed despite the entry of companies like TIGO and Vodacom in the market and a growing role for microfinance institutions that emphasize small-scale finance. Researchers studied 37 institutions all over the region, which included places like Mufundi Community Bank, Njombe Community Bank, or Tandahimba Community Bank. They interviewed general managers, loan officers, and other bank personnel and identified a number of reasons that mobile money might be appealing, including "flexibility to adapt to client needs" (44%), "greater outreach to rural areas" (30%), "new sources of revenue by commissions" (30%), and a "greater number of clients" (15%). They also cited difficulties when electricity was unstable or the network slow, problems with training and marketing existed, or forced loyalties restrained consumer choice. Although they lamented limitations of time and acknowledged that "the field is not a laboratory," they pointed out that this was also highly original research given current literature reviews.

Speakers Panthea Lee and Zack Brisson of Reboot presented a design-savvy talk about "Value Systems in China: A User-Centered Approach to Designing Inclusive Second-Generation Banking." (Brisson was formerly active in the anti-genocide organization Enough.) In leading off his talk, Brisson joked that it was "almost as scary talking to a room full of anthropologists as it is to talk to a room of psychoanalysts." He described ReBoot as devoted to "getting to better research results" by understanding "lives and contexts" and the fact that "process maters." In focusing on China as a region of interest with an economy that was "literally skyrocketing," he argued that it was important not to forget the "many left behind" by "exacerbated economic inequality. Now, he insisted "innovation is possible" if it aims at "an inclusive, second-generation banking system. Brisson argued that China was a particularly likely area in which the unbanked could become banked through mobile money, because 70% of the population used mobile phones, remittances already shaped financial practices, and there were many existing agents. Like M-PESA in Kenya, there was also a clear vision for partnership between the telcom and the financial institution, as in the case of China Mobile and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank. Although these technologies may follow different uptake patterns, "desire for financial stability is universal."

Brisson and Lee described the core of their methodology as ethnography. Their study of study of mobile money focused on 4 cities and 6 towns and villages across a cross-section of the country. During a period of three weeks they conducted 113 interviews in the context of homes, places of business, or communal gathering points. The study relied on both unstructured and structured interviews and observations of direct service use in sectors such as health care and travel. As they explained, after unprofitable rural banks were closed as a result of market reforms, there was a strong need for mobile money to improve access to financial services. They noted that migrant populations were another important factor in the economies that they studied and that such Chinese often treated as another commodity, although they contributed to half of the nation's GDP and worked much needed high-risk, low security jobs. Furthermore, the marginalization of minority populations could create more obstacles to financial inclusion for certain segments of the unbanked, such as herdsman who had been forbidden from raising livestock by the authorities. (Older parents may have been compensated for the loss of their livelihoods, but children were not eligible for these government payments.)

Lee and Brisson emphasized three main themes:

1. Trust, defined by the in-group tendencies of kin, caste, or geography
2. Uncertainty, which might cause some to choose to forgo the risks associated with pursuing wealth. (As one couple said of their lives under Mao, "We knew we were poor, and would continue to be poor. That's better than not knowing where we will be tomorrow.")
3. Touchpoints

Lee and Brisson argued that it was necessary to design for agents, intermediaries, and influencers, not just end-users and to focus on trust, networks, and relationships. (Those interested in this approach may also want to check out the "infomediaries" research of The Global Impact Study and the work of François Bar.) For more about the work of Lee and Brisson in China, see ReBoot's blog posting on "Mobile Money in the Land of Mao."

"Best Practices in Mobile Microfinance" by Fatima Yousif, Elizabeth Berthe, and Olga Morawczynski provided a global overview of how the technology was being adopted in multiple countries. As Yousif explained, although MNOs focus on quickly profitable services, MFIs have to focus on the hard-to-reach and difficult-to-profit from. In their study an online survey was sent to over 100 microfinance institutions, and the group also conducted direct interviews of 16 MFIs, mostly in Kenya 16 MFIs, with the aim of addressing the relationship between "industry and us" and the "need to address real needs." By focusing on areas like low agent penetration, the group was able to examine social and commercial sustainability. Socio-cultural complications and research challenges are inevitable when mobile phones are frequently shared, there are problems with checks and controls, and there are low literacy levels. Yousif noted that in Cambodia low-end phones might not able to read Khmer script, and that there may be other complications in countries with citizens who have low literacy levels in own language to begin with relying on text applications. She also observed that there may be situations in which it is still less expensive to travel to a bank than to use mobile payment services, so newer technical solutions weren't always welcome. She said that it was surprising to see how few institutions did cost-benefit analyses, and how many providers assumed that there was no need for market research, because a particular approach was "obvious." In a market dominated by money transfers, where mobile network operaters know they can make the most profit, innovation was often hampered by pre-existing assumptions and the fears of stakeholders. For example, loan officers feared losing their jobs if new technologies were adopted. She also pointed out that the success of M-PESA was "both good thing and a bad thing," and she cautioned against "copy and paste" approaches in other regions. Certain factors may be "necessary but not sufficient," particularly in markets that are urban and peri-urban. She argued that "IT/MIS integration is one of the greatest challenges faced by MFIs today," a problem exacerbated by top-down decision-making.

She closed with a number of recommendations, which included "understand your market environment," "communicate, communicate, communicate," "invest time in developing your distribution network," and "test and monitor your product," because "new uses will come up." Her recommendation to "collaborate with regulators" proved to be the most controversial piece of advice during the question and answer session that followed.

As moderator Dourish asserted, "HCI not about interfaces but about relationships between design and use" and "producing designed effects." In answering his own question about where the sites of innovation might be, he emphasized the importance of "temporalities of innovation" and "directionalities of innovation." He also noted that "operator selection" was a "design decision in its own right."

Liz Losh's Guest Blog: Taking Mobile Money Out for a Test Drive

The next panel on "Mobile Money: Adoption, Uptake & Transformation" was filled with both facts and figures and narratives about inclusion and alienation. In "An Assessment of Adoption and Use of Mobile Money Services in East Africa: Case Studies from Uganda and Tanzania" by Batilda Moshy and Paul Mukwaya, researchers examined the customers' experiences with companies like MTN, Airtel, and UTL in Uganda and Vodacom, Airtel, and TIGO in Tanzania to assess how "social cultural" factors play a role in adoption, although the presentation opened with responses to more conventional survey questions about ease of accessibility, security, convenience, decreased travel time to service points, cheaper costs, good service, and decreased time spent queuing. Mukwaya pointed out that customers' and potential customers' decision-making and perceptions might also be shaped by the company first in the market, as in the case of MTN in Uganda.

They noted the importance of acknowledging instabilities and network failures, and -- like many researchers on the day's previous panel -- they asserted the importance of branding, customer care, and managing vendors. They claimed that successful awareness campaigns included several media outlets and road shows. They also observed that unregistered users could be incentivized to become registered users by "walled gardens" that made certain services more expensive.

In "Differences Between Fee Structure of Mobile Money Technologies and Traditional Banking Systems, Social Psychological Determinants and Service Uptake: A Case Study of Uganda," Bruno Yawe and Tinah Nassali used interviews with officials from the bank of Uganda to understand how fee structures might shape the attitudes of potential users. Although researchers complained about how challenging it could be to get data from banks and grappled with the complexity of accounting for transactions across the Uganda-Kenya border, they were able to show that large amounts of mobile money was banked in in customers' accounts and that it was used for many purposes, including the payment of school fees.



Jose L. Estuar introduced his talk on "Mobile Phone Cash In Cash Out Service in a Frontier Area: The Dynamics of New Money Technology and Embedded Systems of Money Relationships" with the official video above from CGAP, which showed a fluent montage of images of GCASH usage, but he also presented less polished videography from his ethnographic work with 43 households in a frontier village on a remote peninsula in the Philippines, where he also studied financial diaries. Estuar's videos showed the arduous journey by boat to his field site and card-playing in unlit domestic urban interiors to give his audience a stronger sense of place. In explaining his research on cash in and cash out services, he also said that "we will tell the stories as we go along" of "social and cultural relationships. Estuar characterized the larger project of his research as an exploration of "embedded money relationships" in the "money ecology of a frontier area."

Following Viviana Zelizer -- the Princeton sociologist who studies how interpersonal connections enter into the production, distribution, consumption, and transfer of economic value, Estuar described himself as interested in subjects who are "partly autonomous" and in interdependent relationships that are historically variable rather than in financial analysis that focuses exclusively on impersonal instruments or objectifiers. He also made no claims of finality: as he explained, “for now we tell stories of this work in progress.”

The Philippines is a country that Estuar said had reached 43% penetration with mobile phone use. As he joked, the nation even had Angry Birds, and he showed an image of Filipino spokesperson apl.de.ap of the Black Eyed Peas as an endorser of mobile phone technology. His research focused on an area outside of Manilla, which was hard to reach but not totally inaccessible and located in a spot that was not an island but might as well be, because there was no road, and visitors had to choose between travel by boat or attempting to navigate the dense thicket. His methodology involved a housing index in which domiciles might be named "house 1," "house 2," or "house 3." He reflected about how these houses related to each other in terms of money and how they might be at different stages. As he observed, "scholars call it dependency; we call it something else . . . a relationship." Although he granted that the question might remain if such a relationship was unfair, he argued that Mark Granovetter's embeddeddness theory encouraged scholars to explore how social relationships might include a seemingly exploitative boat owner.

The irony that Estuar emphasized was that a telecommunications device had been put into the hands of people in this remote area of the Philippines seemingly in order to make expansion beyond a tight circle of social relationships possible, so they could exercise more economic independence. However, ultimately the device facilitated existing relationships rather than established new relationships, particularly among people with a strong preference for face-to-face interaction rather than neutral exchanges with remote markets.

Liz Losh's Guest Blog: Self-Recognition and Brand-Recognition in African Moneyscapes

The first panel of the second day of the annual IMTFI research conference, "Mobile Money: Consequences for Poverty Alleviation," was as much about mobile carriers' strategies for public rhetoric and practical communication as it was about any possible causal connection between the adoption of mobile money as an individual practice requiring digital and financial literacy and alleviation of systemic poverty in Africa.

Presenter Karatu Kiemo presented a talk on "Mobile Money Services and Entrepreneurial Development in Rural Communities: The Case of the Agricultural Kikuyu and Pastoral Maasai Communities in Kenya" that compared financial practices of Kikuyu and Masai tribesman to understand possible differences between agricultural and pastoral populations in a case in which both groups are proximal to Nairobi. (Co-author Barbara Leseni was not able to attend the conference.)

Kiemo tried to understand the region's low entrepreneurial activity, which researchers initially hypothesized could be cultural. Their subjects were mostly unbanked, but researchers wondered if having new services might foster budgeting, saving, and risk management that would make adoption of MMS more appealing. Using Icek Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior, the Kenyan researchers hoped to understand personal attitude, perceived behavior control, and entrepreneurial intention, while also measuring personal finance management that might even include future estate planning.

Information in Kiemo's study came from 174 participants, divided approximately equally between agricultural and pastoral respondents. 83.9% were owners of their own mobile money platform, while a significant minority were also users of borrowed phones and/or SIM cards. Researchers found a significant difference in entrepreneurial intention between mobile money service users and non-users: 75% vs. 50%. Yet there was no difference that could be measured between early adopters and later adopters of the technology. The hypothesis that these services also might promote personal finance management was also supported, but the data about mode of livelihood as a factor was more ambiguous. Researchers expected pastoral populations to be more fatalistic and less likely to budget, but those in the pastoral sample actually were active managers of their finances. However, 42% of agriculturalists used mobile money, while only 7.7% of pastoralists did. In fact, 49% of the latter still save with "live assets" (their animals). 90% of the agriculturalists reported entrepreneurial intentions. Researchers found Maslow’s hierarchy of needs useful as an explanatory mechanism of the phenomena that they observed.

Ndunge Kiiti and Jane Mutinda followed with a study focusing on Eastern Kenya and the use of M-PESA. Rather than only focusing on high-level strategies of corporate brand penetration, in "Mobile Money Services and Poverty Reduction: A Study of 21 Women's Groups in the Rural Region of Eastern Kenya" examined self-help groups as well, such as the Strength of Women (VWAG) in which the researchers were also members. M-PESA has tried to capitalize on the forms of person-to-person education practiced by those groups. In the image above Kiiti holds up the M-PESA t-shirt that she draped on the podium during the panel.

Kiiti cited the saying that "a human becomes a human because of other humans" to characterize the researcher's framework, which moved step-by-step from a focus on "individual" to "family" to "community" to "nation" with an emphasis on training and workshops. Their data was gathered from 21 women’s groups where, following the dictates of Paulo Freire, everyone is a learner, and everyone learns from each other. Researchers did field work that included site visits to the groups' social settings, where they conducted multiple in-depth interviews with individuals and five focus groups. They also performed observations of user behaviors with M-PESA. Clearly, Kiiti argued, the service caters to groups without banking and builds on the existing urban-rural linkages that were described by Mas & Morawczynski.

Perceived advantages included M-PESA's security and safety, privacy and confidentiality, convenient access at many outlets, and advantage from the perspective of time management. In a world in which "delays are losses," this efficiency really mattered to the women that they studied. Researchers more broadly claimed that M-PESA promoted rural development, assisted in business, encouraged good record keeping, created employment, and fostered participatory culture around rewards programs. M-PESA also facilitated group payments, which could also affect group dynamics negatively, because of possible social losses resulting from decreased face-to-face contact. Other problems included fraud, network failures, excessive user charges, risk of debt from freer spending, limited services, and lack of disability access. Kiiti argued that technocratic approaches might miss the importance of a "powerful speaker" or a sociological understanding of group names, where terms like "love," "commitment," and "unity" frequently shaped group identity. (A working paper from Kiiti and Mutinda is posted here.)

The panel's final presentation on "Does Mobile Money Matter? Exploring Mobile Money Adoption by Ghana’s Urban Poor" from Vivian Dzokoto and Edwin Mensah repeatedly made the point that "Ghana is not Kenya." In 2008, apparently, mobile money services were introduced, but "nothing happened." Even after 2010, when four telephone companies were in the market, Dzokoto described the main feature of the Ghanaian "moneyscape" as resistance to new money products. Even debit cards were slow to be taken up in a country where only traditional ATM cards had been successful. Researchers chose "awareness," "attitudes," "uptake," "barriers," and the "impact" of mobile money as the focuse of their year-long study of mobile money post-(re)launch, which focused on 35 low-income Ghanaians and 35 non-poor lower middle class income Ghanaians, as well as a review of documents that included magazine advertisements and brochures, along with location scouting for billboards and mobile money advertisements.

Dzokoto and Mensah reported confusion about the role of banks, a lack of trust, and fear of both excessive spending and the loss of the phone. The higher income group had more complex understanding of mobile money, although less than 10 had actually used mobile money themselves. This group also lacked awareness of global context of mobile money, and were even unfamiliart with its non-remittance potential, because they had seen so much sending of mobile money person-to-person advertised on television. Interviewing vendors and merchants also showed low patronage of mobile money services typified by the following comment: "They took the ezwich machine away and have not brought it back." In other words, despite visible marketing, there was low awareness, and thus a need for person-to-person education existed. (It was noteworthy that during the Q&A, one commentator noted that providers might shift liability to their clients through financial education in ways that serve corporate self-interest rather than financial inclusion.)

Companies like AIRTEL may have two million mobile phone subscribers, but only 1% of their customers were registered for mobile money, and such corporations offered hands-0n workshops for journalists, like one held in November of 2011, rather than one-to-one education aimed at users. In the case of TIGO, which had designed a post-launch marketing campaign, the carrier had done relatively better, particularly by differentiating between table top phone credit vendors and mobile money agents to promote trust. As they closed with images of Accra Mall or buildings on Oxford Street, Mensah reminded the audience that "In Ghana, cash is still king."

Moderator Maria Stephens of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and noted mobile money skeptic reminded the audience that not every country would have the same kind of experience that Kenya had had with M-PESA. She pointed out that just as Nixon argued that democracy is not a potted plant that can be transplanted into any soil, it was important to not fall into the we-build-it-they-will-come trap. Stephens also differentiated between "promoting a low-value low-functionality money transfer service" that functioned in an income-smoothing context or "a high-value unlimited functionality model" tied to broader financial services not subjected to banking laws that could unintentionally allow a parallel shadow banking system to flourish.

Liz Losh's Guest Blog: From Statecraft to Neighborhood Soap Operas

In the final panel of the day on "Currencies in Collision," the first presenters came from Birzeit University to discuss "Management and Mechanism in Palestinian Economy in Multi-Currencies Context" in a study that represented the collaborative efforts of Nidal Rashid Sabri, Diama Abu Laban, and Deema Waleed Haniya, although only Laban and Haniya could attend the conference in person.

They described the different sectors of the economy as follows: 1) the official banking system composed of 18 banks, which were mostly foreign, but included both commercial and Islamic institutions, 2) moneychangers specializing in the buying and selling of currencies, 3) about nine microfinance organizations (besides UNRWA), 4) about forty FOREX trading firms, 5) the insurance sector, which is comprised of 10 corporations, and 6) the financial market, which consists of one stock exchange. Presenters reminded the audience that Palestine was a country under occupation, in which territories were not connected and the land was dotted with very poor areas, such as refugee camps.

The central fiscal challenge, as they described it, was the fact that there was no national currency, since prohibitions on statehood make printing and circulating their own money forbidden. As a result citizens were forced to use three separate currencies in use for different purposes: the U.S. dollar, the Jordanian dinar, and the Israeli shekel. Palestinian ATMs deal with all three currencies, and people generally understand the currency conventions in use. For example, when dealing with lands, the dinar is the only accepted currency, but when buying an apartment the dollar is used, and daily transactions were conducted mostly in shekels.

Furthermore, the Palestinian team described limited availability and awareness about using innovative financial instruments. In their entire country, there are only two banks with Internet banking, and no mobile money in use at all. Finally, the fiscal landscape is shaped by high incoming remittances from Palestinians sending money home from work abroad. Thus, presenters argued that factors that shaped behavior around saving in these currencies suggested the need for fundamental revisions.

As they explained, the research group's methodology focused on examining the related laws, rules, and regulations, analyzing the related data, and conducting interviews with both bank treasurers and clients about the three currencies. What they discovered that currency choice was most determined by personal income currency (44%), trust was the second most important factor (27%), and comparison of interest rates was a relatively minor factor (17%). Bank officers provided explanations of user reluctance to use e-banking as follows: they "don’t know how to use it," "don’t know about about existing technologies," and "prefer personal interactions." They also assumed that security issues or fears of hacking were more important than their clients did. Their findings indicated a need for awareness campaigns, a need to adopt new regulations, and a need to connect treasury transactions.

The theme of alternative currencies was continued in the next paper from Magdalena Ramada-Sarasola, Henk van Arkel, and Eduardo Tarrag about C3U in Uruguay: "Determinants of the Demand for Micro-saving Programs in Uruguay: Motivation and Resistance to Join C3U." In introducing herself to an audience suspicious of economists, speaker Ramada-Sarasola did confess, "I am an economist. I must admit that," but she also showed a matrix of two-way transactions involving individuals, firms, government, and banks and financial institutions. She explained how the innovative money system C3 or Commercial Credit Circuit was developed by the Social Trade Organization (STRO) and supported by several bilateral and multilateral donor organizations piloted since 2005 in Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Brazil had already facilitated 12,000 small loans that were approved in a circuit aimed at increasing liquidity by focusing on business-to-business transactions and setting up regional business networks.

Ramada-Sarasola's case study focused on mobile money in Uruguay with an emphasis on issues involving "trust," "scale," and "the chicken and egg track" in a region where 45% of the population was unbanked. She argued that one of the major factors favoring successful adoption of C3 in Uruguay was participation by the Uruguayan government sector to address the issue of scale, since all state-owned enterprises accept C3 and bills for water, electricity, public transport, and communication can be handled with C3, and even taxes can be paid with C3. Governments also had reasons for encouraging C3 beyond the "political agenda" of financial inclusion and promoting themselves as altruistically motivated, because being able to track transactions opened up opportunities to tax those transactions, although the government has promised that this new tax revenue will go to the local community that is generating them.

This C3U research focused on a sample of 28 neighborhoods around Montevideo, where penetration of mobile phones was an astonishingly high 116% and the illiteracy rate was relatively low. Furthermore there was great trust in retailers and a public bank serving as a warrant. They found no a priori resistance to adoption among the 45-77 year olds interviewed about their demographic profiles, understanding of context, use of mobile phones for services like text messaging, financial behavior, and acceptance of mobile money. The only notable area of resistance involved buying and selling merchandise, which researchers attributed to the lack of young people on the pilot and the high default rate associated with stores.

(The "two currencies" of Uruguay are further explained to English speakers by a blogger in a posting here.)

The final research from Chile from Jose Ossandon Valdes, Tomas Ariztia, Macarena Barros, and Filipe Gonzalez on the "conflicting currencies" panel covered "The Financial Ecologies and Circuits of Commerce of Retail Credit Cards in Santiago de Chile." Valdes described how researchers drilled down into a rich data set of recollections that captured intersecting financial narratives based on interviews, files, notebooks, and bills, which allowed the team to map circuits and reveal an entire history of retail cards, although stores were not always happy to give all information that they kept on the families of customers. The small domestic dramas included characters like 31-year-old Francisca whose husband was in jail and 66-year-old Maira with two sons working in the fruit market. We learned about how these characters spent their limited resources on discrete purchases like buying a pair of pajamas, a hoodie, a bottle of perfume and how cards circulated among people to facilitate such purchases. Figuring out accounting when so many people lent out their cards and then figured out who used it later created thousands of possible soap opera episodes in the circuit of commerce that Valdes detailed. Of course, not all the portraits were complete. As he noted Juana might have a suitcase where she saved all the receipts from credit card bills, but Maria might make her own clothes and try only to buy in cash.

This these smaller circuits of commerce, the risking of friendship ties was often a nothing type of potential liability from financial participants. For example, Paula might be irritated by neighbors paying late without paying interest after borrowing her card. The Chilean researchers summarized their preliminary findings with a few major themes, which included "rationality" in which participants must negotiate complex uses and multiple alternatives, "ecologies" as ways to understand the financial lives of those excluded from banks but not stores or might be excluded but not members of the poorest groups, "circuits" in which credits are mixed with kinship relationships and systems of care, and "social-technical networks." (Only one participant saw the cards as only "private.") However, there are rules and conflicts, which community members often understood through the similarity of forms of association, so that this system is not new for them.

Moderator Scott Mainwaring from Intel noted that each presenter on the panel ultimately used a different methodology to visualize the financial flows that they described, but they all asked "where do different currencies flow?" and "where are there barriers to this flow?" as they explored their common interest in circuits, although they might have different lenses for what a circuit is. This panel about alternatives dealt with many affordances and constraints, particularly when the preferred alternative is banned, as in the Palestinian case.