Financializing “the poor”: the Peruvian and the Ecuadorian mobile money platforms

• In Event: Latin American Enterprises and Investment Finance

Abstract

Financial inclusion is rapidly becoming the predominant policy paradigm for global development: it stipulates that a personal bank account is the first brick for a better future. For decades, development agencies focused primarily on microcredit schemes for entrepreneurial poor people, often women. Local NGOs around the world administered access to money for those considered ‘unbankable.’ Today financial inclusion is both displacing and extending the policies of microcredit. The once-unbankable are now the ‘not yet banked,’ prime for inclusion in the financial circuit of banks. Development agencies often cite ‘mobile money’ as the agent of this shift, a technological innovation that gained traction first in Africa, and allowed millions of people who were previously transacting only with cash to now use digital payments via their cellphones (smart or not). This phenomenon signals the viability of financial inclusion as a development goal; it draws financial corporations, fintech startups, and global development agencies alike to the lucrative business of catering to the ‘unbanked.’ In this paper I compare two mobile money platforms, the Peruvian “Billetera Movil” and the Ecuadorian “Dinero Electronico” implemented at the same time in dramatically different political and economic contexts and both claiming financial inclusion. My research is informed by fieldwork with technocrats, bankers and IT engineers that work together to co-produce mobile money as both a financial technology and a development model in Peru and Ecuador and builds on an urgent concern with the ways in which financialization transforms development practices and reshapes inclusion ideals (Roy 2010, Elyachar 2012).

Author

• Mariel Garcia Llorens