Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion

This research explores the value transfer system of migrants working on daily wages in Karachi’s marketplaces. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper focuses on an informal money transfer system and how such channels overlap with emerging digital finance and branchless banking networks such as Easypaisa, the fastest and most popular service provider in Pakistan.

Preliminary research shows that the rapid rise of Easypaisa, used for sending and receiving money and bill payments, offers an instant method of money transfer to laborers who have historically existed outside of the formal banking system. The integration of the unbanked is carried out under a state-led financial inclusion program aimed at developing the country’s financial sector in order to provide easy access to credit, loans, and savings. While the state offers a legal and security framework, telecommunications and financial industries have formed a nexus offering branchless banking and money transfer services to the laborers. In this paper, I explore how branchless banking networks function by interlacing with the old patterns of capital flows based on kinship and trust, and how new financial tools make laborers vulnerable to global economic crises.

The questions I seek to investigate are:

1) How do laborers transfer value from the city of Karachi to villages and tribal areas of Pakistan?

2) How does the state’s counter-terrorist surveillance impact laborers’ traditional value transfer system?3) How are emerging financial technologies such as branchless banking shaping customary ways of handling money in Karachi’s marketplace?