I wondered if there's been much EA work on facilitating remittances, other than Wave?

https://odi.org/en/insights/more-action-is-required-to-lower-the-costs-of-remittances-through-mobile-money/

Remittances are higher than aid and foreign direct investment,  and increase rather than decrease during economic downturns. 

It seems like there are actionable methods to facilitate more remittances.

In low income countries: prioritising electrification, mobile networks and internet connectivity.

In high income countries: using regulatory levers and / or subsidies to promote competition between mobile money and fintech companies.

These methods don't seem very amenable to EA's usual randomista approach to development (eg - I can't find work by J-PAL evaluating whether expanding mobile phone access improves remittance flows).

I'm aware that GiveDirectly sometimes buys people phones to enable cash transfers - I wonder whether the effects of this on remittance flows has been studied?

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The GiveDirectly founders (Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus) also founded TapTapSend (https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/20/taptap-send-raises-65m-to-build-cross-border-remittances-focused-on-the-most-underserved-markets/) which competes with Sendwave to keep remittance prices down.

Do you (/anyone reading this) know if TapTapSend is for-profit (/whether they're just using their current profits to scale but have hopes of slashing fees once they do so)? 

I know very little about the business model of remittance companies, but from two seconds' worth of thought, this seems like an area where a nonprofit could try to undercut the market and provide a massive public good.

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