It’s a brave new world out here

Like any respectable young man, I enjoy getting a fresh haircut from time to time. For the past few years I have been rocking a fro, and occasionally I will go get a fresh lining. Ever since I was a child, my father has consistently made me get a Caesar cut every two weeks, but now that I am comfortably grown, I like to let my hair grow as it pleases. Recently, I stopped by a barbershop that I’d heard good things about to get a shape-up. I told the barber to give me a quick lining and to even shape up my fro. I knew there was a misunderstanding as soon as I felt the steal of the clippers go across the back of my neck. Obviously, I was livid but I told the barber to just finish.

Initially I wasn’t going to pay for a darn thing, but the barber was older and looked like he couldn’t afford to lose the money. Being the respectable young man that I am, I angrily pull out my money and prepare to leave, but when I went to pay for being stripped of my identity, the owner asked me if I would rather pay with a credit card. Being the savvy inner city youth that I am aswell, I immediately told him no because I was sure that this would end with me calling Chase and contesting a few charges. My cynicism proved wrong when the barber pulled out his mobile phone and promptly used a mobile card reader. As someone who works in the mobile finance industry, I was elated to see a black owned business that was taking the foray into mobile card processing, even if I was looking like Poussey from Orange is the New Black after receiving my hair cut.

My heartwarming anecdote withstanding, seeing the card reader in this barbershop did alleviate some of my concerns about the access African Americans have to the future of financial services — mobile payment services. Since the first large scale phone based credit card reader first debuted its mobile card reader in 2009, I knew that it would change the way people use money. Credit cards were something to which only the most well connected or financially secure businesses had access. Unfortunately, African Americans historically have rarely fallen into either of these categories. Through a litany of centuries long social injustices, that I don’t need to list here, African Americans have been denied access to traditional financial institutions, and as the Wells Fargo fiasco during the 2008 financial bubble showed us, financial institutions are in no hurry to change their lineage of discrimination. This is where companies like Square, Paypal, Chase, and soon, Apple, come in. They are circumventing older means of payment and using data driven analytics to pursue customers that have been denied access in the past. Yet do these new customers include African Americans?

Through the rise of Black Twitter, we know that African Americans are certainly pulling their weight on the internet, and according to Pew, African Americans are more likely to use their phones for everyday means than whites and about the same as Hispanics. It seems evident that black folk will also use mobile banking at equal amounts. With that being said, the same study says that while Hispanic Americans use their phones for online banking, African Americans are still lagging behind both their white and Hispanic counterparts. As someone that spends the majority of their time between two heavily African American communities in St. Louis and Chicago, I can personally attest that African Americans may have a bit to go in both access to and trust of mobile financial institutions, particularly African Americans in older age brackets.

I recently tried to make my middle aged, well educated relative download a money transfer app, and I was met with quite a bit of push back by her and her siblings. Again, it’s not that I blame older African Americans for being leery of mobile payments. There are more than a handful of very truthful anecdotes going around of black people being scammed out of their savings by too-good-to-be-true services, and why should a service where I can charge my neighbor for cutting the grass or transfer money to my high school cousin be righteous? To someone that is weary of large institutions, mobile payments sounds like a white millennial fairytale, or even worse a white millennial version of payday loans.

Mobile finance is here to stay, and it will continue to be a driving force in the future of banking both in the black community and in America as a whole. Banking in America has been a tough road for African Americans, but this doesn’t have to continue to be the case. I think mobile payment companies have done a wonderful job at providing a services to those that may not have access to traditional banking, but will these services turn into access? I honestly can’t say, but I know that I’m still waiting for my hair to grow back.