Know Your Customer regulation

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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Managing Risk and Complexity: Legal Entity Identifier

Prior to the financial crisis, even an informed observer might have naïvely believed that the CEOs of big financial firms could simply push a button to view the current exposure of their firms to any other firms in the world. Or, if less technologically advanced, they could call their chief risk officers or chief financial officers to obtain end-of-day positions.

Not even close. By the time that Lehman failed in September 2008, large financial holding companies had evolved into extremely complex structures with hundreds or thousands of subsidiaries for which the parent companies lacked consolidated information technology and risk-management systems. The multiplicity of information systems meant that different parts of the same firm employed varying names and codes to identify the same counterparty. Fixing this, merging all of the information structures and ensuring consistency, would have been an expensive proposition that managers (compensated out of current profits) had incentive to delay.

Correcting these deficiencies in the financial infrastructure is not a trivial matter. Simplifying the problem requires the creation of a unique, universal, and permanent identification system for both institutions (financial and nonfinancial) and instruments. Realizing the nature of the opportunity and the challenge, in November 2011, the G20 called for the creation of a global legal entity identifier (LEI). Importantly, everyone realized that given the massive size of the financial system that supports both domestic and cross-border activity, the solution had to be global. (For pioneering analyses, see work by the Federal Reserve and the Office of Financial Research. For up-to-date information on the LEI, see here.)....

 

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