Remittances

Libra's dramatic call to regulatory action

Facebook’s June 18 announcement that it has created a Geneva-based entity with plans to issue a currency called Libra is sending shock waves through the financial world. The stated objectives of creating Libra are to improve the efficiency of payments and to ease financial access. While these are laudable goals, it is essential that we achieve them without facilitating criminal exploitation of the payments system or reducing the ability of authorities to monitor and mitigate systemic risk. In addition, any broad-based financial innovation should ease the stabilization of consumption.

On all of these criteria, we see Libra as doing more harm than good. And, for the countries whose currencies are excluded from the Libra portfolio, it will diminish seignorage, while enabling capital outflows and, in periods of stress, accelerating capital flight.

Like Bank of England Governor Carney, we have an open mind, and believe that increased competition, coupled with the introduction of new technologies, will eventually lower stubbornly high transactions costs, improving the quality of financial services globally. But in this case, we urge a closed door….

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The Stubbornly High Cost of Remittances

When migrants send money across borders to their families, it promotes economic activity and supports incomes in some of the poorest countries of the world. Annual cross-border remittances are running about US$600 billion, three quarters of which flow to low- and middle-income countries. To put that number into perspective, total development assistance worldwide is $150 billion.

Yet, despite the remarkable technological advances of recent decades, remittances remain extremely expensive. On average, the charge for sending $200―the benchmark used by authorities to evaluate cost―is $14. That is, the combination of fees (including charges from both the sender and recipient intermediaries) and the exchange rate margin typically eats up fully 7% of the amount sent. While it is less expensive to send larger amounts, the aggregate cost of sending remittances in 2017 was about US$30 billion, roughly equivalent to the total non-military foreign aid budget of the United States!

In this post, we discuss remittances, why their costs remain high, and what might be done to lower them.

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Modernizing the U.S. Payments System: Faster, Cheaper, and more Secure

When it comes to domestic payments, the U.S. financial system still lags the efficiency in several advanced economies. The reasons are easy to find. First, other countries have leapfrogged outdated technologies. In the United States, checks remained dominant well after their technological sell-by date partly as a result of government support. The other key factor delaying a shift to alternative payment mechanisms is the importance of what economists call a network externality. That is, the more people who use one form of payment, the more valuable that method is to the people who are already using it. And, by the same token, the more expensive it is for someone to move away from the prevailing mechanism.

With these considerations in mind, two years ago the Fed convened the Faster Payments Task Force (FPTF), a group of more than 300 experts and interested parties from a wide range of backgrounds with the objective to “identify and evaluate alternative approaches for implementing safe, ubiquitous, faster payments capabilities in the United States.” Earlier this month, the FPTF issued its second and final report, which contains a set of 10 recommendations for making the payments system faster, cheaper and more secure....

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