Safety and Speed in App-Based Remittance Transfers
Week 2: Labour, Money and Markets
Jenny Silver
Laura Bear’s (2014) concept of “timespaces” in the context of river pilots is useful in analyzing how notions of time both produce and mitigate risk. Bear’s article brought to mind a very different context in which time optimization is said to decrease risk, namely the remittance transfer market. Mechanisms of remittance transfer have long been of interest to international organizations. A World Bank report from 2008 on the financialization of transfers within the Indonesia-Malaysia remittance corridor cautions that “informal transfers” (i.e. those not through standardized financial institutions such as banks) have “substantial risks” (p. 37). When individuals are entrusted with carrying remittances from one country to another on behalf of a migrant worker, the funds are subject to checkpoint seizure and theft. Undocumented migrants are particularly vulnerable to these risks because they are unable to access many official channels of transfer.
A new partnership between WorldRemit and Alipay seeks to address some of these issues by creating a “remittance service that is fast, secure, and cost effective” (Hurst 2020). Through app-based transfers, WorldRemit and Alipay promise a partnership that, as Tamer El-Emary, Chief Commercial Officer of WorldRemit, explains, “will focus on innovation, customer experience and speed to market” (Hurst 2020). The buzzwords of “speed” and “safety” are central, with the implicit premise that a faster and apparently more direct mode of transfer is a less risky one.
Reading of this technology with the backdrop of Bear’s article leads me to question to what extent the promise of large, corporatized transfers neglects what Bear describes as “the emergent, piecemeal solutions for the contradictions product by the anti- or afunctional practices of contemporary capitalism” (Bear 2014, p. 78). What strategies have migrant workers themselves put in place to make their transfers safer?
Additionally, how do WorldRemit and Alipay differ from companies like Western Union as mediators? In what sense does the image of the app’s safety rely on the invisibility of its corporate mediators? Put another way, do people perceive transactions via apps as unmediated and thus safer?
Sources:
Hernández-Coss, Raúl; Brown, Gillian; Buchori, Chitrawati; Endo, Isaku; Todoroki, Emiko; Naovalitha, Tita; Noor, Wameek; Mar, Cynthia. 2008. The Malaysia-Indonesia Remittance Corridor : Making Formal Transfers the Best Option for Women and Undocumented Migrants. World Bank working paper; no. 149. Washington, DC : World Bank.
Hurst, S. (2020) “WorldRemit Announces New Global Remittance Partnership With Alipay”, Crowded Media Group, January 23. Available from https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2020/01/156684-worldremit-announces-new-global-remittance-partnership-with-alipay/.
Contributed by JennySilver on 26/01/2020
