It's not often that reading a book related to my professional activities reminds me of my grandmother. Born in 1900, she regularly stuffed me with tapioca pudding. Decades before the Instapot, she mastered the pressure cooker. Always ready with a hug, she turned up on page 46 of Bill Maurer's How Would You Like to Pay? How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money.
My grandmother always carried a penny, loose, in her "pocketbook" for good luck. If she gave me a handbag or coin purse, there would be a penny inside. It was essential. I couldn't walk out the door without a penny for luck.
My Proustian moment came when I read Maurer's comment: "People working on new technologies of money tend to assume that money is just money. But money is so much more, besides." And up popped the penny, a memory buried for decades.
You may have childhood memories around the idea of money-as-more-than-money. An uncle who surreptitiously handed over a crisp bill, perhaps. Or adult memories—for example, the dry cleaner who refused to exchange two of my singles for one of his lucky $2 bills.
Maurer
, an anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, posits that such extra-monetary characteristics of money are important for financial product design going forward. And, indeed, we've seen examples of form factors that add value. Doug King has reported that some consumers are enamored of metal credit cards. "They love how metal cards feel and they love the sound that they make when they drop them on a counter or table." My neighbor tells me that she feels cool tapping her watch to pay for groceries. Many consumers work hard to keep a pristine titanium card clean; some store it in a special pouch.
There's something more to this than a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value, as Maurer notes when he describes the use of money in rituals around the world. He writes that people do "all sorts of things with money besides earn it, pay with it, and save it." Take, for example, my origami dog, pictured here.
How are financial institutions and fintechs incorporating ancient totems into product design so that the safest way to transact would also have this sort of intrinsic value-add? Let me know your thoughts.
By Claire Greene, a payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed