Bill Maurer
Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Professor, Anthropology and Law UC Irvine
- Irvine CA
Bill Maurer is an anthropologist and expert on money’s artifacts and technologies, from cowries to credit cards and cryptocurrencies.
Media
Social
Biography
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
Accomplishments
Lauds and Laurels Award for Faculty Achievement, UC Irvine Alumnae Association, UC Irvine
2011
Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research, UC Irvine
2010
Visiting Faculty, Microsoft Research New England, Cambridge, MA
2015
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
2016
Member, Sigma X
2016
Fellow, Filene Research Institute
2018
Dynamic Womxn of UCI Ally Award
2018
Education
Stanford University
PhD
Anthropology
1994
Stanford University
MA
Anthropology
1990
Vassar College
AB
Anthropology, Women’s Studies
1989
Affiliations
- 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
Media Appearances
What Is Debt-to-Income Ratio?
U.S. News & World Report online
2026-05-04
You can calculate your DTI ratio by adding up all of your monthly debt payments and then dividing the total by your gross monthly income. … "People often get confused and think it's the total amount of money you owe on your debts," says Bill Maurer, director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine. "It's what you have to pay each month compared to what you receive each month."
LSR’s Newest Editors are Pushing Law and Society into the Future
Law & Society Review online
2026-03-26
“We’re living in a world where you can’t just assume, in the classic law and society tradition, that there are exogenous forces that impinge upon the practice of law and that make things happen in certain ways, and ‘maybe we can fix it!’” explains Bill Maurer, the Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the Law and Society Review’s new General Editors.
Banks plead for federal guidance as penny shortage spreads
American Banker online
2025-11-20
The U.S. Mint may have celebrated the end of the one-cent coin last week, but experts say the penny crisis is just beginning. ... "It's still a train wreck," said Bill Maurer, director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine. "I think now it is becoming more apparent to people, because it's spreading around the country, and it's hitting more and more stores." ... "In other countries that have done this … they always roll out giant public education campaigns ahead of time," Maurer said. "The United States did not really do anything."
Got exact change? Penny shortages already hitting some retailers
USA Today online
2025-10-23
This creates “critical choke points in the coin distribution system around the country,” said Bill Maurer, dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and director of UCI’s Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. “By ceasing deposit acceptance at coin terminals, the Fed is gumming up the whole distribution system for pennies, resulting in regional shortages and pushing banks to deposit pennies further away, which will accelerate their removal from parts of the country,” Maurer told USA TODAY.
Good intentions rooted in economic stress
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel online
2025-07-30
According to Professor Bill Maurer, a cultural anthropologist and director of the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion at UC Irvine, the concept of digital money is rooted in periods of economic stress. … “The benefits are not what was initially intended and to date are not being realized. There are serious investors, though, who are watching the space closely and are looking at which blockchain system is the most resilient because if there were to be something built on top of these systems, that’s where you’d want to put your money.”
Articles
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.
