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.