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Whose noninteroperability? Experimentation and reimportation in the payments space

Whose noninteroperability? Experimentation and reimportation in the payments space. Bill Maurer Department of Anthropology Director, Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion University of California, Irvine. The “payments space”. Convergences: Yunus and the Grameen Bank

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Whose noninteroperability? Experimentation and reimportation in the payments space

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  1. Whose noninteroperability? Experimentation and reimportation in the payments space Bill Maurer Department of Anthropology Director, Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion University of California, Irvine

  2. The “payments space” • Convergences: • Yunus and the Grameen Bank • Worldwide spread and adoption of mobile phones • Renewed drive for fee-based revenue/average revenue per user (ARPU)

  3. The “payments space” • Who’s in it • What are they doing • What convergence of forces led to the development of this space • Why is it a “space,” anyway?

  4. Business strategies in the payments space • Take what is already there, and scale it up; formalize it (e.g., miPay formalizes SMS airtime minute trading) • create something new based on what is already there, but make your own proprietary system (e.g. M-PESA) • Layer new functionality on top of what already exists (e.g., POS terminals) • Aim for total interoperability and dominance – think big

  5. Is this BoP? • Each of these could be seen as BoP strategies • BUT: What’s being leveraged here is not the poor as producers or the poor as consumers, but: • The poor as innovators in reshaping money itself, reshaping money as a means of exchange, method of payment, store of wealth and possibly measure of value • This has big implications

  6. The larger project/context: 1) Discoveries of what can be done with mobile technologies – appropriations, mashups, hacks, using unintended affordances 2) New channels for money and finance, and new forms of money, are additive, not supplantive – complex monetary ecology, not global interoperability (look in your own wallet)

  7. Larger context, con’t 3) Regulation in/of the payments space: unrealized effects and unintended consequences [identity management, KYC, AML/CFT] 4) The social milieu in which the payments space is being developed – the story of “us”

  8. Finally: 5) Mobile moneys as new experiments with money; tinkering with money’s classic functions; complicating BoP perspective AND complicating the critique (of extraction, dispossession, etc.). -- “reimportation” thesis

  9. Extraction, or experimentation and reimportation? Compare the plantation system’s role in providing models for industrial production back in the metropole

  10. Analogies • Innovation and creativity • creation of new forms of value, new markets, separate economies alongside the plantation: creole economies (nb: non-interoperable economies)

  11. Analogies • Experimentation and reimportation

  12. Experimentation and reimportation

  13. Experimentation and reimportation “CFSI led a group of financial services and policy experts to examine the innovations of the financial services industry and government to increase the use of financial services by the underbanked. The trip was a resounding success and provided many vital lessons and insights”

  14. Phase shifts • Plantation slave as now forced labor, then subsistence producer and market participant; as now object of a market exchange, then subject • Phase shifts

  15. e.g., sente in Uganda Jan Chipchase & Indri Tulusan, http://www.janchipchase.com/sharedphoneuse

  16. Making do with “money” and thereby re-embedding it • From “time is money” to “money is time” • From universal commodification (everything is money) to a partial, phase-shifting temporality (money or talk can betime)

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