Mobile Money: Communication, Consumption and Change in the Payments Space

By Bill Maurer. 2012

284 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This article explores the emerging field of ‘mobile money’: mobile phone-enabled systems for value transfer and storage, primarily in the developing world, which are heralded as signal interventions in the effort to broaden financial inclusion and bank the ‘unbanked.’ Focusing on the stories that circulate in the emergent network of expertise that is calling ‘mobile money’ into being, it discusses how economic techniques and social narratives about markets – specifically, narratives about the opportunities for profit and financial inclusion in the ‘payments space’ – format a consumer market for mobile money. Furthermore, it asks whether end-users' repurposing of mobile money – and the use of airtime as currency – heralds a new means of exchange or store of value, potentially remaking money in the process.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/47437c6f27fc2a86f27b05afccd0ebac2b61633f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Karen P. Y. Lai
2. M. Samers
3. Sally Brooks
4. Daniela Gabor
5. Benjamin Braun

In Information Systems

1. Karen P. Y. Lai
2. M. Samers
3. Sally Brooks
4. Daniela Gabor

In Management Information Systems

1. Karen P. Y. Lai
2. M. Samers
3. Sally Brooks
4. Daniela Gabor

Citations in the corpus

• The digital revolution in financial inclusion: international development in the fintech era (2017, background): “As Maurer (2012) points out, attempts by the financial industry to ‘format’ the poor into customers have been subverted and transformed precisely because the poor innovate, appropriating technologies in ways that cannot be predicted by algorithms or their creators.”
• Towards an economic geography of FinTech (2020, background): “A fourth perspective on FinTech provides a relatively more sanguine discussion of regulation and market-making support, while recognizing the regulatory challenge of balancing innovation with risk (Arner et al., 2015; Maurer, 2012; Shim and Shin, 2016; Tsai and Peng, 2017).”