When you come to the game do connect with MetaMask, or connect with wallet, connect wherever and use your non-custodial wallet. Remittances is pretty big, $650 billion or something a year, but still a small portion of total payments.
In the Philippines, which is a big country with a diverse economy, it's still 13% of the GDP is remittances . So there's a housekeeper in Toronto. Her name's Annalee Domingo.
terms of charitable giving uh foundations and other types of assistance it's the fact that this is the this country is the largest source of remittances in the entire world so again peopo people uh diasporic uh giving from uh exp Patriots in this country to uh poor countries in the world whether it is the Philippines or India or Mexico all of those things are
When you come to the game do connect with MetaMask, or connect with wallet, connect wherever and use your non-custodial wallet. I find the remittance questions are often people in the US probably don't think so much about cross-border remittances .
And that whole confidence level you've built up changes. So our international remittance product failed. But in that whole learning process, we understood that there's a huge component of domestic remittance .
And we said, let's try domestic remittance . And domestic remittance was a phenomenal success. And as I said, in our regional plan, there was no domestic remittance as a product.
So we got to the second stage of what was getting people now to get to a comfort level after utility bills, to start making domestic remittances . The problem was that we went to the agent.
that's you know maybe new technologies new approaches can find ways to provide these services cheaper the the classic example of sending remittances home to people who come from Central America or Africa other parts of the world uh currently that's just a very expensive proposition you can think of you know people are coming up with new ways to do that that's a lot cheaper be really
And they're also able to obtain foreign exchange. The amount of remittances worldwide from people in developing countries sending money home is now in 2011 reached $351 billion. That is more than three times all of the foreign development assistance that has gone to developing countries during
They were very poor. to get remittances to send their money back home.
When you come to the game do connect with MetaMask, or connect with wallet, connect wherever and use your non-custodial wallet. I'm just thinking when I say remittance , I'm just thinking the transfer of stablecoin, not Bitcoin or ETH for the sake of payout
So we are working with them in terms of grounding their ideas with our network, and then if some of these actually stick, What do you learn in the remittance sections of the Bkash transaction that could be useful for e-commerce as well in Bangladesh or outside as well?
Today in fact there's a venture backed company called Abra, which is doing just that. It's using Bitcoin to provide cheaper remittances to more than 100 countries. But what people realized was that the things you store and transmit on a blockchain doesn't have to be money.
to figure out a way to pivot. So we thought our biggest product was going to be international remittance . Pakistan gets $17 billion a year from workers in the Middle East, in the UK, and in the US.
But you might notice there that often the poorest and the people that are suffering the most have to end up paying the highest fees. Well, remittances are a $600 billion market today. The idea is that Bitcoin or maybe another digital currency that surpasses it has a chance to grab a piece of that market
the past 20 25 years both partly with the mobile phone partly with the internet and partly with the beginnings of a consumer society some of that initial was from remittances or Africans living in the US and Europe coming back and establishing themselves in either
So they give it to your family back home. And we said, let's try domestic remittance . And domestic remittance was a phenomenal success.
BRAC bank started Bkash in 2011, with a mission towards including the very bottom of the people, financially. Which means that actually, not only just remittance but the big vision is that introducing financial products and services that works for the poor. So it was a great fit for Bangladesh, because in Bangladesh we have 90% of the household has mobile phone, but only 30%
So we are working with them in terms of grounding their ideas with our network, and then if some of these actually stick, One of the area your Bkash could be very useful of the remittance is the e-commerce.
That cash isn't doing anything for them until they have to make the payments. Then on the consumer level, you have remittances . This is when immigrants want to send money back to their loved ones in their home countries.
And therefore the large payment providers would flock to come to us because we would have such great distribution. Well, the only thing we miscalculated was the average remittance size is $40,000-- sorry, 40,000 rupees. And the small agent doesn't have liquidity to pay out five of these payments in a day.
So our international remittance product failed. But in that whole learning process, we understood that there's a huge component of domestic remittance . $15 billion are paid domestically in Pakistan.
like buying things directly. But we don't have ecosystem yet quite ready, so money's mostly being used for remittance purposes. So this is how it worked.
that might be fun. so, here's some of the things, I went and searched that people said about me in the comments section. "Yet another article that reinforces my impression that Ayelet Waldman is in laymen's terms a freak! . I hope Salon's remittance goes directly into some kind of trust fund to the poor kid's future psychotherapy." . Here's another one; "Please, with lots of Es, please, please take her away! She's ruined
And domestic remittance was a phenomenal success. And as I said, in our regional plan, there was no domestic remittance as a product. But that's when you start pivoting, too-- when your original plan fails.
So this is another way of rendering it and showing just how many people are moving around the world within and across and amongst the continents. And it shows you not only how important it is, how systematic it is demographically, but how important it is economically in terms of the values of the remittance flows. And so there's an enormous two-way benefit, of course, to global migration.
And so you have all these traders out there on their cellphones all the time tapping into a global patent of commerce. And one of the things we're seeing is that access to the international networks of trade, things like remittance flows, arbitrage, the movement of currency or the movement of goods around the planet has overtaken agricultural surplus as a major driver of city growth.
They were very poor. But because we don't have that set up very easily-- the banking system's so weak, there's no banks in these rural areas, there's not a remittance system, and so the
the other direction. And this has been borne out in evidence recently that economists have published, finding that each year about $2 trillion US dollars flows from global North to global South, in terms of aid, foreign direct investment, loans, remittances , everything. But at the same time, we see that $5 trillion flows the other direction, from South to North.
Nigeria, massive population growth, as with Kenya. Now, migration is good not only for the people that migrate, but also for the societies they're leaving because of remittances going back,
And it's something that directly affects some of the poorest people the world. So in Haiti, 25% of the GDP, the whole country, is remittances . In the Philippines, which is a big country with a diverse economy, it's still 13% of the GDP