Remittances Can Revolutionize Latin America’s Finances
Their explosive growth is an opportunity to promote the region’s digitalization and the inclusion of low-income workers into the formal economy.
Remittances are building more than houses.
Photographer: Koral Carballo/Bloomberg
It’s a busy morning at this Coppel store in Iztapalapa, a working-class district on the east side of Mexico City home to almost 2 million people. Customers flock to buy appliances, get loans and, on the last day of April when I visited, receive money from relatives abroad who were just paid.
This store by one of Mexico’s largest privately held companies processes between 45 to 60 remittance operations per day, mostly from senders in the US, up from 25 to 35 a day two years ago. Juan López, who aspires to set up his own tattoo business, uses Coppel’s banking unit to cash out a transfer of almost $100 that his brother living in Omaha, Nebraska, sent to him through a phone app. He tells me that the money will help with the recovery of a cousin, who recently suffered an accident.