Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion

We set out to explore this question, starting from the viewpoint that if financialintermediaries persist, they must add some kind of value to the transactions they areinvolved with. What is this value, then? To uncover the value that human intermediariesbring to such encounters, we studied the roles they perform in financial transactions. Wethen analyzed which of these roles were amenable to being taken over by mobile moneyand phones, which ones were viewed as strictly linked to humans and why.

To answer these questions, we conducted multi-country field research on financialtransactions in Kerala, southwest India (Srinivasan) and in Shan state, northeastMyanmar (Oreglia). In Kerala, our focus was on fishers and in Shan state, on agriculturalcommunities. In order to understand “who” moves money in these contexts, we took astep back and started from “how” money moves. Separating the “how” from the “who”turned out to be the first step in recognizing that intermediaries do not merely perform afunction that can be accomplished instead with the use of technology. Rather, they createvalue for their customers in complex ways that a functional description such as “moving money from place x to place y” does not fully capture. This is part 1 of 2 blogposts.