Erin B. Taylor - Böcker

Poverty is generally defined as a lack of material resources. However, the relationships that poor people have with their possessions are not just about deprivation. Material things play a positive role in the lives of poor people: they help people to build social relationships, address inequalities, and fulfill emotional needs. In Materializing Poverty, anthropologist Erin Taylor explores how residents of a squatter settlement in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, use their material resources creatively to solve everyday problems and, over a few decades, radically transform the community. Their struggles show how these everyday engagements with materiality, rather than more dramatic efforts, generate social change and build futures.

This timely book provides a comprehensive analysis of digital financial services across diverse socio-economic landscapes, moving beyond technology-focused perspectives to examine the complex social and cultural dimensions of financial innovation.Chapters explore how digital financial tools, from mobile banking to AI-based FinTech innovations, function as both economic instruments and catalysts for sociocultural change. Through a human-centric perspective, the contributors challenge the prevalent techno-optimistic narratives surrounding the topic, highlighting that outcomes are shaped by existing social hierarchies, cultural norms, and power dynamics. Key topics discussed include: the high hopes and the risks that digital financial services introduce; sustainable finance; household financial dynamics; trust; and financial inclusion. The book further advocates for context-sensitive approaches that balance innovation with equity and cultural pluralism.This book is a vital resource for students and academics in sociology, anthropology, finance, business, economics, development, and science and technology studies. It is also an insightful read for finance professionals, policymakers, and technology innovators.

The competition landscape of finance is changing fast and it has never been so important for the finance industry to truly understand their customers.Customer-Centric Innovation in Finance helps finance and fintech innovators understand customers' behavioural motivations to drive effective product development. Relying on quantitative data is not enough: numbers can be great at telling us what people are doing but they often fail to explain why people do what they do. And if a service doesn't exist yet, there is no data to tell us how people use it. Human insights, behavioural science and qualitative data add immense value to product development. Readers will learn to innovate smarter by getting a firm understanding of why customers like their solutions and how they adapt them to suit their needs.The book presents real-life examples throughout of how customers are changing their behaviour in response to a fast-evolving financial landscape and provides practical advice on how to transform such insights into innovation. It explores how to produce customer insights for services that don't exist yet, for instance Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). It also provides descriptions of hands-on tools to build new insights and apply them to innovation and of methodologies such as portable kits, personas, digital ethnography, observations and interviews.

The competition landscape of finance is changing fast and it has never been so important for the finance industry to truly understand their customers.Customer-Centric Innovation in Finance helps finance and fintech innovators understand customers' behavioural motivations to drive effective product development. Relying on quantitative data is not enough: numbers can be great at telling us what people are doing but they often fail to explain why people do what they do. And if a service doesn't exist yet, there is no data to tell us how people use it. Human insights, behavioural science and qualitative data add immense value to product development. Readers will learn to innovate smarter by getting a firm understanding of why customers like their solutions and how they adapt them to suit their needs.The book presents real-life examples throughout of how customers are changing their behaviour in response to a fast-evolving financial landscape and provides practical advice on how to transform such insights into innovation. It explores how to produce customer insights for services that don't exist yet, for instance Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). It also provides descriptions of hands-on tools to build new insights and apply them to innovation and of methodologies such as portable kits, personas, digital ethnography, observations and interviews.