Bill Maurer

ResearcherModernb. 1968· American

Anthropologist of money and payments, dean of the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine, and founding director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. He coordinated research in more than 40 countries on how mobile money and new payment technologies reach people banks never served, tracing money's tools from cowrie shells to cryptocurrencies. Called the doyen of the anthropology of finance, his books include How Would You Like to Pay? and the six-volume A Cultural History of Money.