Whose noninteroperability? Experimentation and reimportation in the

payments space

Bill MaurerDepartment of AnthropologyDirector, Institute for Money, Technology and Financial InclusionUniversity of California, Irvine

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)

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?

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

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

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)

Larger context, con’t3) 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”

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

Extraction, or experimentation and reimportation?

Compare the plantation system’s role in providing models for industrial production back in the metropole

Analogies Innovation and creativity

creation of new forms of value, new markets, separate economies alongside the plantation: creole economies (nb: non-interoperable economies)

Analogies Experimentation and reimportation

Experimentation and reimportation

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”

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

e.g., sente in Uganda

Jan Chipchase & Indri Tulusan, http://www.janchipchase.com/sharedphoneuse

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 be time)