Mariel Garcia Llorens (University of California, Davis)

Unbanking the Bank: how Peruvian Banks Platformized Themselves through Mobile Payments

“Cash is the enemy,” declared the CEO of YAPE, Peru’s largest mobile wallet app, with over fifteen million active users, in a recent interview. Over the past two decades, this idea has underpinned the discourse of ‘financial inclusion,’ fostering a wide range of experimental practices digitizing previously unbanked cash. YAPE, now used by everyone from corporate executives to street vendors, holds an almost monopoly over mobile payments in the country. Marketed as an accessible alternative to traditional banking, it is, paradoxically, owned by Peru’s largest bank holding company. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how banks reinvent themselves in the era of embedded finance. While embedded finance typically refers to non-financial companies integrating financial services, I explore the reverse through the case of YAPE in Peru: how banks learn to platformize themselves. I suggest that banks must unbank themselves—learning to think and act such as tech giants like Google, Apple, and Facebook—to reach the unbanked and remain relevant financial mediators in platform economies.

Bio:
I am a scholar of media and money, fascinated by how the technologies we use to communicate and transact shape culture. My work explores how mobile payments, cryptocurrencies, and digital financial inclusion initiatives transform cash economies particularly in Peru and Latin America, drawing upon diverse fields, especially economic anthropology, science and technology studies, critical development studies and media studies. How we pay—becoming increasingly digital, multifaceted, yet controlled by a few—offers a powerful lens to understand both how we live and how we are governed. I study the social aspects of money transformations to understand the futures of economic life, technological governance, and social relations that we are bringing about.

I hold a PhD in Anthropology with a focus on Science and Technology Studies from UC Davis (2024). My dissertation examined the development and implementation of a national mobile money initiative led by a partnership of banks, based on extensive fieldwork with engineers, policymakers, financial professionals, and end-users. I am currently working on transforming this research into a book manuscript, which reveals how financial infrastructures are built, how they shape economic life, and how local communities negotiate their inclusion in—or exclusion from—mainstream financial systems. By analyzing how financial technologies are designed, implemented, contested, and used in unexpected ways, my research sheds light on the social, political, and ethical dimensions of digital financialization.

Beyond my work on financial technologies, I have published extensively on economic inequality, youth digital cultures, extractivism and environmental conflicts, and media politics in Peru. I was previously a researcher at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, where I also served as editor of the journal Argumentos. I am the co-author of Solo Zapatillas de Marca: Jóvenes Limeños y los Límites de la Inclusión desde el Mercado (Brand-name Sneakers Only: Lima Youth and the Limits of Market Inclusion, with Francesca Uccelli, published by IEP, 2016), which examines the social mobility aspirations and economic constraints of low-income youth navigating consumer culture in Lima.

I am committed to research as a form of service, especially when it drives social impact and leads to tangible benefits for people by bridging academic inquiry with broader social and policy debates.

I am also a passionate teacher who loves to learn and co-think with students. At UC Davis I have taught Introduction to Anthropology and Politics in Latin America both with an emphasis on digital lives and money, and Women and Development. In Peru, I have taught qualitative research methods and writing seminar courses at two universities, PUCP and UPC.