Alternative remittances to Venezuela: ad hoc technological diffusion and monetary pluralism

Working paper

Venezuelan migrants have been historically excluded from formal money‑transfer channels because of US sanctions and domestic financial dysfunction. As a result, there is a strong culture of using alternative remittances methods amongst the Venezuelan diasporas. Drawing on digital ethnography and semi‑structured interviews with remitters, receivers, and industry professionals this article explores how inventive use of financial technology (FinTech) infrastructure has created two novel remittance modalities which serve as the core case studies under analysis. First, are digital in-kind remittances whereby grocery items in a Venezuelan supermarket can be purchased online in e.g. US dollars and delivered inside Venezuela. Second, is use of Zelle (a US payments app which was designed for feeless peer-to-peer transfers between US citizens). The use of Zelle to send remittances to Venezuela has in turn ‘sent back’ Zelle itself, which became a popular payments platform inside Venezuela. The volume of these remittances is significant, and these new remittance mediums thus have profound and under researched effects on the domestic Venezuelan economy. I use the term ‘ad hoc technological diffusion’ to show the improvised ways in which how through the practice of remitting money, migrants have also ‘sent back’ new FinTech assemblages and, likewise, how by using FinTech assemblages, new remittance mediums have been enabled. These two remittance modalities thus capture the complex relationship between novel financial practices and novel forms of remittances. These practices are characterised by a blurring of the physical and the digital and the ‘informal’ and the ‘formal’. The article explores how these emerging economic phenomena are structured by socioeconomic inequalities, erratic Venezuelan government policy and external pressures from the US.

Authors: Robins, D

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: Global Network on Financial Geography
• Series: Financial Geography Working Paper Series
• Publication date: 2025-10-03
• ISSN: 2515-0111
• Paper number: 39
• Language: English
• Keywords: P2P; remittances; monetary pluralism; dollarisation; migration; FinTech; SBTMR