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Bill Maurer - UC Irvine. Irvine, CA, US

Bill Maurer

Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Professor, Anthropology and Law | UC Irvine

Irvine, CA, UNITED STATES

Bill Maurer is an anthropologist and expert on money’s artifacts and technologies, from cowries to credit cards and cryptocurrencies.

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Videos:

UCI Blockchain Bootcamp - Professor Bill Maurer - Blockchain and the History of Money Bill Maurer, Expert on Mobile Money That Touch of Money: The Cashless Past, Some Cashless Futures, and the Public Good Bill Maurer: Blockchains are a Diamond’s Best Friend

Audio/Podcasts:

UCI Podcast: What's next in the School of Social Sciences?

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Biography

Professor Maurer is a cultural anthropologist and sociolegal scholar. His most recent research looks at how professional communities (payments industry professionals, computer programmers and developers, legal consultants) conceptualize and build financial technology or “fintech,” and how consumers use and experience it. More broadly, his work explores the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment, from cowries to credit cards and cryptocurrencies. As an anthropologist, he is interested in the broad range of technologies people have used throughout history and across cultures to figure value and conduct transactions. He has particular expertise in alternative and experimental forms of money and finance, payment technologies, and their legal implications. He has published on topics ranging from offshore financial services to mobile phone-enabled money transfers, Islamic finance, alternative currencies, blockchain/distributed ledger systems, and the future of money.

He is the Director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (www.imtfi.uci.edu). From 2008-2018, he coordinated research in over 40 countries on how new payment technologies impact people’s well being. Highlights from IMTFI’s research were published in Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion, and Design (with Smoki Musaraj and Ivan Small). Since 2018, IMTFI has been the Filene Center of Excellence in Emerging Technology. With Filene, Maurer has been exploring how fintech impacts the credit union movement, exploring topics ranging from algorithmic bias in consumer-facing applications of AI, to the often-ambiguous lessons fintech apps teach their users. His research has had an impact on US and global policies for mobile payment and financial access, and it has been been discussed in venues ranging from Bloomberg BusinessWeek to NPR’s Marketplace and the Financial Times.

Areas of Expertise (6)

Payments Industry

Law

Anthropology

Cryptocurrencies

Money and Finance

Consumer Finance

Accomplishments (7)

Dynamic Womxn of UCI Ally Award

2018

Fellow, Filene Research Institute

2018

Member, Sigma X

2016

Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science

2016

Visiting Faculty, Microsoft Research New England, Cambridge, MA

2015

Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research, UC Irvine

2010

Lauds and Laurels Award for Faculty Achievement, UC Irvine Alumnae Association, UC Irvine

2011

Education (3)

Stanford University: PhD, Anthropology 1994

Stanford University: MA, Anthropology 1990

Vassar College: AB, Anthropology, Women’s Studies 1989

Affiliations (8)

  • American Anthropological Association
  • American Ethnological Society
  • Society for Cultural Anthropology
  • Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
  • Society for Humanistic Anthropology
  • Law and Society Association
  • Royal Institute for Linguistics and Anthropology (Netherlands)
  • Social Science History Association

Media Appearances (6)

AI promises 2025 advances for payments industry

Payments Dive  online

2025-01-21

Fintech companies are also going to use AI to browse a customer’s transaction history and needle them to make more purchases, said Michael Imerman, an assistant professor of finance for the UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business and author of the book ‘The Economics of Fintech.’ … Unexpected card declines will also grow less frequent partly due to artificial intelligence, said Bill Maurer, director of the UC Irvine's Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. AI can instantaneously create a risk profile for a customer, based on data that is not typically included in a credit report, such as their spending and payment history, he said.

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What Is a Debit Card?

U.S News & World Report  online

2024-11-25

"With a debit card, you're accessing, via a card, money that's in your bank account," says Bill Maurer, director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine. … Maurer suggests turning off overdraft protection on a debit card – which entails using funds from another linked account (such as a savings account) to cover transactions – because a thief could drain your checking account and keep spending.

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What is a Promissory Note?

U.S News & World Report  online

2024-11-19

Promissory notes outline a loan agreement's specific terms and conditions as a legally binding document that formalizes your commitment to repay a specified amount of money within a particular time frame. "A promissory note is basically an IOU," says Bill Maurer, director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine. "It's a written statement of a promise to pay a specific sum of money by a specific time. Think of it as an IOU that's legally enforceable."

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A cap on credit card fees would hurt department stores most

Marketplace  online

2024-04-29

Credit cards were invented by retailers. “In the beginning, this was just done as a bookkeeping thing,” said Bill Maurer, a professor of anthropology and law at the University of California, Irvine. “You know, in a notebook, behind the counter, essentially.” … “Retailers and merchants really sought a way to get customers to keep coming back to their shop instead of going to their competitors to the point where some merchants almost functioned like bankers,” Maurer said.

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Why do we toss coins into fountains?

CNN  online

2024-03-30

Bill Maurer, an anthropologist and the dean at the University of California, Irvine’s School of Social Sciences, said many cultures previously used offerings such as food, special stones, carved artifacts and herbs. But with the invention of coinage in what is now modern-day Turkey between 500 BCE and 600 BCE, people largely switched to money. … “It’s not so much about the payment, but how the coin itself has a quasi-magical property people think comes with it,” he said. “It has a connection of sovereignty and represents a token of authority.”

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UC Irvine welcomes the Year of the Dragon with performances, cultural activities

Daily Pilot  online

2024-02-06

“The rain is actually maybe kind of appropriate for this Year of the Wood Dragon because [the rain] symbolizes vitality and abundance — the kind of vitality and abundance that will sprout forth after all this rain goes away and we get some sun again,” said Bill Maurer, the dean of the school of social sciences at UC Irvine, in his introductory remarks for the celebration. … In his remarks, UC Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman said the event was more than just a celebration of Lunar New Year. “It is a reflection of unity from the dynamic rhythms of UCI Hansori to the enchanting Gio Nam Lion Dance,” Gillman said. “Our celebration [is bringing] together age-old customs and contemporary expressions, bridging generations and cultures.”

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Articles (5)

Primitive and Nonmetallic Money

Handbook of the History of Money and Currency

Bill Maurer

2020 Feathers, beads, shells, copper bracelets, and giant stones – objects that Western observers have assumed serve the functions of money in so-called simple societies and other non-Western contexts – come in all shapes and sizes. This chapter reviews the literature on “primitive” currencies, from early ethnology to contemporary anthropology and archeology.

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TOKENS - Culture, Connections, Communities

Royal Numismatic Society Special Publications

2020 The volume contains 15 of the contributions offered by speakers at this event. While the conference had a thematic format to encourage scholarly exchange, the chronological presentation of papers here will allow readers to trace the development of tokens over time.

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Payments are Getting Political Again

The PayTech Book: The Payment Technology Handbook for Investors, Entrepreneurs and FinTech Visionaries

Bill Maurer

2019 Payments are political in that they are a function of state sovereignty, and also an extension of it. This is old news, of course: money itself emanates from state sovereignty. But digital payments, obviating the anonymity of cash transactions and generating vast quantities of data in their wake, provide new opportunities for states to extend their reach. These politics of payments are not, of course, limited to authoritarian regimes.

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Finance as ‘bizarre bazaar’: Using documents as a source of ethnographic knowledge

Organization

Daniel Tischer, Bill Maurer, Adam Leaver

2018 Markets and finance have long attracted ethnographic interest but the nature of their activity – opaque, secretive and increasingly placeless – precludes traditional ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we propose documents as an alternative access point to these organisations as an ethnographic object of enquiry.

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Social Payments: Innovation, Trust, Bitcoin, and the Sharing Economy

Theory, Culture & Society

Future of Money Research Collaborative:, Taylor C Nelms, Bill Maurer, Lana Swartz, Scott Mainwaring

2017 The payments industry – the business of transferring value through public and corporate infrastructures – is undergoing rapid transformation. New business models and regulatory environments disrupt more traditional fee-based strategies, and new entrants seek to displace legacy players by leveraging new mobile platforms and new sources of data.

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