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
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
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
Penny production going away
Spectrum News 1 online
2025-06-04
A 2022 survey found that 20% of consumers never even use cash. And now, here in 2025, President Trump is ordering the Treasury to stop minting pennies due to production costs. Here to discuss the end of pennies and its impact is Bill Maurer, dean of the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine. … “My reaction, in general, is that this is a kind of ‘proceed with caution’ matter because you just said that about 20% of Americans never pay with cash, but then there’s about 18% of Americans who always pay with cash, and if this is the beginning of a step toward eliminating other coins or bank notes, that’s really going to put a squeeze on people who live in a cash economy,” says Maurer.
How Does a High-Yield Checking Account Work?
U.S. News & World Report online
2025-03-25
You may have the option to waive the monthly maintenance fee by meeting requirements such as maintaining a minimum daily balance, receiving a direct deposit or completing a minimum number of debit card transactions. These requirements allow the bank to profit from your account, says Bill Maurer, professor of anthropology and law at the University of California, Irvine, who researches payment technologies. "Making you use your debit card means the bank will get fees from the interchange on those transactions," he says.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
