Diaspora Financial Services for Mobile Populations

Abstract

Technology is removing the barriers of geography from the financial services industry. Yet, product offerings to the retail consumer and small business market still reflect the traditional limits of single community membership. During the Middle Ages, Florentine banks established an extensive branch network throughout the known world, not to attract new customers, but to facilitate the business transactions of Italian merchants The value proposition for operating a local branch presence in the merchant economy of fourteenth-century Europe was simply to reduce the time and cost of negotiating terms with local suppliers and buyers, thereby allowing vessels to presell cargo and merely dock and unload goods without having to take the goods to the market. Like the merchant branch network and its underlying value proposition, today’s society is experiencing migrating populations that require a similar service. To illustrate: approximately 50,000 people of Brazilian heritage live and work in the area of greater Boston, Massachusetts, with strong family ties and social links to their native country. Like all communities connected by nationality and culture, many individuals are the umbilical cord for financial support to relations in both continents. The multi-nation, individual connection is in reality a definition of the global family and, at first glance, defines a highly specialized need for financial services. Upon closer examination, it is the basis of a new class of financial services products that allow an individual to obtain financial services in regional economies which span geopolitical boundaries.