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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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
Links (7)
Media Appearances (9)
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."
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.
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.”
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.”
D.C. Is Now Enforcing Its Cashless Business Ban: What That Could Mean for You
U.S News & World Report online
2023-11-27
“People forget that when you make a cashless payment, you’re basically asking your bank to pay for you,” says Bill Maurer, who studies payments at the University of California, Irvine. "If you don’t have a bank, that’s really hard. That’s the barrier.” In addition to disproportionately affecting people of color, cashless businesses make life more difficult for recent immigrants and refugees who may not yet have an American bank account, Maurer says. "It impacts the elderly, who often just don’t have the technical capabilities ….”
LA Latinos Took A Big Financial Hit During The Pandemic. Here’s How Some Are Trying To Bounce Back
LAist online
2023-11-22
“People who were working all of a sudden were trying to provide for more than just who they might have been before the pandemic,” said Bill Maurer, director of UC Irvine’s Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. He said this caused even some not directly affected by illness or job loss to get behind financially. Maurer and other UCI researchers have been looking into the financial status of Latinos post-pandemic as part of a forthcoming study. Getting “back to normal” has proven elusive for people they’ve surveyed, he said.
What Does It Mean to Be Unbanked?
U.S News & World Report online
2024-01-31
"For many, it's not a choice: they can't afford a bank account," says Bill Maurer, professor of anthropology and law at University of California, Irvine. "Because they rely on alternative and often predatory financial services, they also get trapped in cycles of debt and poverty." Maurer says recent immigrants and refugees may struggle to open bank accounts due to linguistic, cultural or trust reasons. "If you come from a country where banks routinely fail, you're not going to trust the bank and probably instead will rely on kin networks or traditional, informal savings clubs," he says.
City Council Seeks Ban on Cashless Business
KABC-TV online
2023-10-03
Tapping and swiping are becoming the norm. San Francisco and Berkeley have similar bans in place. But Bill Maurer, the dean of Social Sciences at UC Irvine, says we can’t forget about people who live in a predominantly cash society, like elderly folks. “Some people with disabilities have a hard time when they’re using a non-cash means of payment and particularly in our part of the world, recent immigrants or refugees – people who haven’t yet set up a bank account – often have a hard time with cashlessness,” says Maurer.
L.A. might ban cashless businesses. Here’s what’s at stake
Los Angeles Times online
2023-08-22
“In L.A., we continue to have a problem with access and affordability of basic banking services,” said Bill Maurer, a professor of anthropology [and dean of social sciences] at UC Irvine who studies currency and payment technologies. … Underbanked people may have a bank account but also rely on alternative financial services. “Maybe they can just barely hold on to their bank account and keep their minimum balance, but are constantly getting into situations where they’re going into overdraft and having to pay overdraft fees, and so on,” Maurer explained. “And so while they may have a bank account, they just don’t use it.”
Articles (5)
Primitive and Nonmetallic Money
Handbook of the History of Money and CurrencyBill 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.
TOKENS - Culture, Connections, Communities
Royal Numismatic Society Special Publications2020 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.
Payments are Getting Political Again
The PayTech Book: The Payment Technology Handbook for Investors, Entrepreneurs and FinTech VisionariesBill 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.
Finance as ‘bizarre bazaar’: Using documents as a source of ethnographic knowledge
OrganizationDaniel 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.
Social Payments: Innovation, Trust, Bitcoin, and the Sharing Economy
Theory, Culture & SocietyFuture 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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