Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion

Final Report/Synopsis of Research Results: The expansion of consumer credits has been one of the most wide-ranging transformations in the last 20 years in Chile. One can argue that Chile has gone through its own process of

‘financialization’ and that this has had a very specific and domestic character: consumer credits. Of course, this is not the only country where consumer credits, and particularly, credit cards, have seen a significant growth. However, recent trends in the Chilean case show an important particularity: the access to credits has neither been driven by banks nor by other traditional financial institutions but mainly by retailers such as supermarkets and department stores. In today’s Chile retail credit cards are not merely used to purchase goods in the issuers’ stores, but also increasingly as revolving credits cards that are usable in an expanding network of places (including airline tickets, private hospitals, pharmacies, and, certainly, other stores). In a developing country, where a large proportion of the population has not traditionally been considered by banks as potential customers, chain retailers are becoming the main access to finance.

This research, using an ethnographic approach and mostly relying on interviews and traces of financial transactions recorded in different objects (such as credit cards bills or notebooks), reconstructed the credit history of 13 different households situated in three areas of the city with low access to other financial services. Two notions were very important in guiding our methodological approach and the analysis of the collected material: “financial ecologies” and “circuits of commerce”.