AFTERWORD

Abstract

AFTERWORD Mobile money, money magic, purse limits and pins: tracing monetary pragmatics Bill Maurer [W]e know no system that functions perfectly, that is to say, without losses, flights, wear and tear, errors, accidents, opacity a system whose return is one for one. (Michel Serres, The Parasite) Purse limits. They come up from time to time as I conduct interviews with people involved in the emerging field of mobile phone-enabled money transfer and savings services ‘mobile money’, as many inside the industry call it. A purse limit is a regulatory construct. It is the maximum amount of electronic value that can be stored in a stand- alone electronic device or in a virtual account linked to a phone number, without requiring verification of the identity of the person who owns that value. Although promoters of mobile money announce that the service will lead to the demise of cash, purse limits, as we shall see, are intimately intertwined with the materiality of the banknote. And though historically populists and other critics castigated paper money for its insubstantiality and fictionality, in the current moment cash comes to stand for substance and fact, through its brute materiality. In order to understand purse limits and why and how they matter, this afterword takes inspiration from other experts trained in the tricks of money’s matter: those who conjure with it, and those who count it. Magicians, and bill sorters. Mobile Money Mobile money is a rapidly growing business, propelled in large measure by the interest it has generated from people in the philanthropic and development sectors, who see in mobile money the potential to provide financial access to many ‘unbanked’ poor in the developing world. Money is expensive to store and to send to one’s friends and relatives, especially for those who lack access to financial institutions. Additionally, such financial institutions are out of reach for many people in urban slums, remote rural areas, or places lacking basic electrical and financial infrastructures. The mobile phone, by contrast, is by now globally ubiquitous. Over 75% of the world’s population has access to a mobile phone, whether their own or someone else’s, shared in a family, shared in a village, or borrowed for a small fee from a microentrepreneur who sells access and talk time (GSMA 2010). The modal mobile is a simple device that can be preloaded with airtime minutes. Rather than having a subscription-based mobile service, in other words, most of the world’s mobile users ‘top up’ their phones with airtime which they purchase from a mobile agent as they need it. People around the world have been using airtime minutes as a de facto informal currency ever since the mobile telecommunications business started permitting people to send ‘minutes’ to one another over the mobile network. Sending minutes and cashing them out at their local mobile service provider’s shop allows people Journal of Cultural Economy, Vol. 4, No. 3, August 2011 ISSN 1753-0350 print/1753-0369 online/11/030349-11 – 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2011.586857