One aspect of migrants’ financial lives that has captured a great deal of academic and public policy attention is remittances – or more specifically financial remittances – which migrant men and women send to their home countries. Importantly, for a number of migrants these transfers represent a first personal interaction with the global economy as they engage with financial services that offer international payments (Toxopeus and Lensink, 2007). Once viewed as a graphic indicator of the failure of development, migration is now conceptualised as being a potential contributor, or indeed, panacea for development, with labour emerging as the most valuable export commodity in a number of countries in the global South (Piper, 2009; Phillips, 2009). Much of this euphoria rests upon remittances, which, within a dominant migration–development discourse, are viewed as being critical in unlocking the developmental potential of migration and beneficial for both the global South and North. In the former they are deemed as having a positive impact upon poverty alleviation and economic growth on a range of scales extending from the household to the nation state. In the latter, where remittances have been viewed as an indication of migrants’ lack of integration in host societies and a loss of resources, they are now recognised as being vital for the development of migrants’ home countries, thus reducing pressures to migrate and so relieving the pressures caused by migration in host countries like the UK (Datta et al, 2007b; Migration Watch, 2009; Van Hear et al, 2009).

Within this context there has been a growing interest in the ways in which money travels back to home countries, with a particular drive to promote the use of formal remittance channels (Ameudo-Dorantes and Pozo, 2005).