Historically, financial systems have excelled at making the rich richer. Bankers have tripped over themselves seeking to serve the wealthiest customers while neglecting the poorest citizens, who are often dismissed as creating more headaches than profits. Inequality in financial access thus piles onto the other inequalities that mark the modern economy—including inequalities of income, job security, healthcare, quality education, and political power.

As Caroline Shenaz Hossein documents powerfully in The Banker Ladies, many of the poorest citizens have not accepted this fate passively. Instead, they have met exclusion with their own home-grown and self-run financial mechanisms. The women described in The Banker Ladies organize what economists call ROSCAs, Rotating Saving and Credit Associations, a mainstay of informal economies around the world. The women of the Caribbean call them Boxhand, Pardner, and Susu, among other local names. In telling their stories, Hossein draws on eleven years of fieldwork across the Caribbean (Chapter 4), in Ethiopia and Ghana, and with members of the African and Caribbean diasporas in Toronto and Montreal (Chapters 5 and 6).

At the heart of a ROSCA is a group of people who come together to help one another obtain sums of money to use for business investment, paying bills, travel, and other needs