U.S. Banks Curtail International Money Transfers
I used to work in the money transfer industry.  Years ago, my team and I built many of the systems that Banorte uses to link the organizations mentioned in the article to paying locations in Mexico (and other regions).<p>I left the industry shortly after we sold our company to Banorte in 2007.  I left the industry for the same reason that we sold the company: a nearly intollerable level of regulatory risk.  It got to the point in 2006 where a number of our profitable and otherwise-healthy competitors went out of business just because they couldn't keep their bank accounts open.  Their bank would get a visit from an OCC examiner, or would ask the FDIC to approve a merger, and instructions would be issued to close all of the money transmitter accounts.<p>In other words, much of what this article talks about is not new.  Here's a very similar article from nearly a decade ago (some of the same people being quoted):<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/nyregion/16remittance.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/nyregion/16remittance.html</a><p>What is new here--what's interesting--is the fact that the banks themselves seem to be shutting down their own remittance services.  I had always attributed previous "crackdowns" to regulatory capture: certain banks saw a wealthy, highly-fractured niche, and used their connections in DC to turn up the heat on the non-bank players in order to weaken them and take market share.  One of the most infuriating things about what we saw happening in 2005-2007 was that while banks were closing the accounts of non-bank service providers, the banks themselves began offering the same services to their own customers, often through the same networks that the non-bank financial institutions were using.  Bank of America was the most prominent actor in this regard; but now, even they have stopped offering money transfer service.  Go figure.<p>It's really unfortunate that such a cool area of tech (international remittances) draws such negative attention from regulators.  If it weren't for that regulatory risk--existential in nature, really--I would still be working in the space.  Ironically, this is also why I don't think that Bitcoin is a solution for international remittances.<p>See, the problem here is cash.  No one is complaining about the lack of availability of SWIFT-based wire transfers between bank accounts.  The transactions being discussed here transit through a secondary banking network that sits atop SWIFT; it is faster (seconds vs. hours), cheaper ($5-$10 per wire vs. $30-$50) and more available (24x7 vs bank hours) than SWIFT, but most significantly, because most of its payouts are made using cash, its participants don't need bank accounts.<p>Cash payouts are made out of necessity.  The majority of international remittance recipiants don't have bank accounts, and the cash they receive from their emmigrant relatives goes to immediate consumtion needs (as mentioned in the article).  Unless those recipients, many of whom live in rual areas, were able to cash out their bitcoins on the spot, a bitcoin transfer would be worthless to them.  And the bitcoin ecosystem faces the same challenges with regards to bank access as the remittance industry does.<p>If you want an explanation as to what is driving this "crackdown", I would attribute it to some desire to significantly curtail the use of cash in these kinds of transactions.  The low-income people who depend on remittances are collateral damage in service of that objective.