When Face Is Your FICO Score: Informal Behaviors of a Microlender in a Bangkok Neighborhood

Research on underbanked and unbanked populations has tended to focus on rural borrowers. Lenders to this disadvantaged population are often seen as loan sharks preying on the disadvantaged or as corporate capitalists using micro loans to financialize the developing world. Building on the concept that money has social meaning and that it both creates and maintains significant local relationships, we explore the lending practices of a small gray-market financier in urban Bangkok. While most anthropology research is borrower-focused, we detail the processes and cultural understandings of making loans, collections, trust, and personal relationships of a lender in a Bangkok neighborhood. From her perspective, lending is perceived as a community service that no other institution provides to the under/unbanked in her neighborhood. Marking a divergence from prior development research, which emphasizes the high interest rates of informal lenders, the difficulties faced by borrowers in rural areas, the gendered relationships and hierarchies developed and sustained via lending, this article highlights the lending-side practices of informal loans and the limited ability to move from the liminal space of the gray-market lending business.