The article repeats a claim discussed by https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03056244.2019.16... "that ‘access to the Kenyan mobile money system M-PESA increased per capita consumption levels and lifted 194,000 households, or 2% of Kenyan households, out of poverty’ (Suri and Jack 2016, 1288). It is no exaggeration to say that this article and its specific poverty reduction claim have electrified the international development community."

"If Suri and Jack’s claims are broadly verifiable, then here we have one of the most important anti-poverty interventions of recent history. Anyone concerned with addressing global poverty, including the current authors, should be very happy indeed. However, extreme caution is warranted. This is because the recent history of the international development community is, unfortunately, littered with claims of miraculous poverty-reducing policy interventions, a great many of which are then shown at a later date to be quite ineffective"

The authors critique the M-PESA claims on six grounds:

* Impact of exit not discussed: "while it is relatively easy to provide financial and other stimuli to encourage certain groups to move into petty entrepreneurship, if there is no commensurate increase in local demand at the same time then the zero-sum end result is simply the redistribution of local demand among a larger number of market participants"

* Impact of displacement ignored: "There is [...] no attempt to compare the outcomes of those households managing to establish or expand a tiny retail business with the help of M-Pesa, and those households in the same community that have no engagement with M-Pesa but are already in possession of, and therefore survive because of, a tiny retail business."

* Rising over-indebtedness in Kenya: "they choose to measure specific household increases in incomes and savings attributable to M-Pesa, but fail to calculate the impact of the wider (but gradual) increases in debt also attributable to M-Pesa. Over-indebtedness has been rising to dangerous levels in almost all parts of the global South where access to microcredit has been facilitated by the international development community"

* Accumulation by dispossession: "as of 2018, the ownership of M-Pesa resides with the Kenya-registered company, Safaricom. [... which] is today 40% owned by the UK multinational Vodafone plc [...] [Safaricom] alone accounts for a massive 40% of the total stock market valuation on the Nairobi securities exchange"

* Wealthy versus poor networks: "the increase in consumption they observe could simply result from wealth being passed along fin-tech-enabled linkages to others in the same family or social circle or class."

* Flawed impact evaluation methodology: "M-Pesa agents, just as with other financial units seeking profit elsewhere in Africa, are well known for proliferating in wealthier urban areas where there are more opportunities to obtain large client numbers and wealthier clients, the combination of which is more likely to generate higher financial returns"

The authors conclude: "There is little doubt that fin-tech has the potential to liberate enormous value. The digital finance sector has been expanding at a mind-boggling rate from China to Southeast Asia, from Africa to Latin America. But the core problem as it stands – as illustrated in Kenya and other places around the world – is that the bulk of this value does not go to the poor. Rather, fin-tech is very clearly designed to hoover up value and deposit it into the hands of a narrow global digital-financial elite that are the main forces behind the fin-tech revolution. Of course, this enormous wealth could be redirected towards Kenya’s poor population and reinvested locally, for example through community-owned financial institutions and financial cooperatives, but there would appear to be little time, sympathy, or political support for building such pro-poor institutions when so much wealth can be appropriated by so few so quickly in another way."