UC Davis

In 2016, an association of Peruvian banks launched a mobile money platform, Bim, announcing it as a tool for financial inclusion. Aligned with the World Bank’s goal of ‘universal financial access by 2020’ and with Peru’s National Financial Inclusion Strategy, Bim promised to provide access to financial services for the seventy percent of ‘unbanked’ Peruvians living in so-called informal cash economies –while generating profits for the banks. Based on extensive fieldwork with engineers, bank representatives, marketers, development consultants, state bureaucrats and shop-to-shop promoters involved in the design and daily operation of this mobile money platform, my research traces the heterogeneous communities of experts co-producing mobile money as both a financial technology for expanding finances in Peru, and as a development model that designs the ‘unbanked populations’ it seeks to engage. By peering into the practices of these experts, my dissertation examines the specific contours of the financial-development network they promised to build and integrate, and the extent to which it mirrors and extends older microfinance practices, further capitalizing on the resources of people living at the margins of more fully banked economies rather than opening new possibilities through the democratization of money as ‘digital cash.’ Rather than a top-down story on how capitalism always wins, my account focuses on the vibrant life occurring within this evolving techno-financial wave. I pay close attention to the tensions and controversies among the various sets of experts involved (bankers, state regulators, engineers implementing the technology), and to the day-to-day economies of small shops that these financial interventions aim to transform. On different scales, both shopkeepers and experts are figuring out how to navigate these money transformations, grappling with the potential future directions that their actions might open or foreclose.