CNNMoney:
What does this unstoppable migration mean for budding entrepreneurs? Plenty. There’s tons of money to be made helping people to move from South to North - and the transfer of wages from North to South. ‘Remittances,’ a catchall term for the cash that immigrants send back to their poorer relatives back home - are already playing a major role in the global economy.
According to the World Bank, immigrants in developed countries last year shipped $250 billion back to developing countries - more than twice the amount sent as international aid. Today, 1 out of every 6 people get remittances in the world. They flow along all sorts of routes you wouldn’t necessarily expect, like the U.K. to Poland and Italy to Kenya and Japan to North Korea. In some Latin American countries, remittances bring in more money than the nation’s largest export.
Remittance fees, which are mostly handled by wire services rather than banks, typically run at about 10% of the amount sent, which makes them ripe for undercutting by any company that wants to scale up to a global remittance operation. Already, mounting competition has cut the average fee in half since the mid-1990s.
Not only are wire transfers a huge growth business, but so too are phone calls. The more connected the developing world becomes, the more immigrants will be in the market for dirt-cheap modes of communication, whether it be phone calls over the Internet or virtual reality hangouts with avatars controlled by family and friends.
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