Inclusive Savings for Remittance Clients: A Practical Framework

This report analyzes the primary challenges that participants encounter in promoting savings accounts among remittance senders and recipients and identifies promising opportunities for innovation to help address these challenges. It is based on a remittances and savings working group meeting that brought together leading experts from across the remittances and financial services industry in the U.S. and Latin America and Caribbean to discuss savings promotion among international migrants and their families. The paper states that more than 20 million households in Latin America and the Caribbean receive financial support in the form of remittances from migrant family members living abroad. It finds that although remittance flows are a private family affair, they may have a considerable impact on poverty mitigation. The paper also provides recommendations for designing a framework for inclusive remittances and savings. Key recommendations include:

• Design products for low-income remittance clients that incentivize continual use over time and encourage use of the accounts for savings and transactions;
• Help remittance clients make lasting changes in the way they manage their money to create more opportunities for saving;
• Keep accounts active by bringing the ability to transact closer to remittance clients;
• Develop financially sustainable savings services for remittance clients.