MADISON, Wis. –The Filene Research Institute has named Taylor C. Nelms as its new managing director of research, a role dedicated to fostering and translating Filene’s groundbreaking research to help credit unions create positive impact in the real world, the organization said.
“The entire Filene team – board, staff and community – is thrilled to welcome Taylor to Filene,” said George Hofheimer, Filene’s chief knowledge officer. “Taylor is one of those special individuals who has the academic pedigree, knowledge of credit unions and a sparkling personality to make a difference in the credit union system.”
Nelms initially worked with Filene in 2015 when he authored Emerging Payments and Communities: Reimagining Trust and Mutual Finance, a research report that surveyed the beginnings of the mobile financial services revolution for credit unions.
Academic Background
In his academic work, Nelms has written on a variety of topics related to money and technology, and he is the co-editor of The Cultural History of Money in the Modern Age, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press, Filene said.
After graduating from The Ohio State University, Nelms received his MPhil from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates-Cambridge Scholar. He spent time, most notably, in Ecuador, where he conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the “solidarity economy” with urban market vendors and family and neighborhood savings groups, Filene added.
“As a proud anthropologist and ethnographer, I am very eager to utilize Filene’s research to better understand institutions, people, and culture,” said Nelms. “Filene has a legacy of putting collaborative and cooperative principles into practice, and I am dedicated to maintaining this focus while pushing forward research on new trends in consumer financial behavior, technology, operational excellence, and community impact.”
Nelms received his PhD in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He previously worked at the Institute of Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion at UC Irvine, and serves as co-editor in chief of the Journal of Cultural Economy.