Remittances gone wild?

It's now easy as pie to send money home. Anyone familiar with labor markets in the Arab Gulf knows that there is a heavy reliance on foreign workers. And that many of these workers send a large portion of the pay home to their families. This supports a large formal and informal money transfer system.

There are new, simple, inexpensive ways of transferring money. Will they be adopted here, and if so how rapidly will they transform the way remittances are made?

From Wired:

Just a decade ago, the idea of moving money that quickly and cheaply would have been ridiculous. Checks took ages to clear. Transferring money from one bank account to another could take days, as banks leisurely handed off funds, levying fees nearly every step of the way. Credit cards made it a little easier to pass money to a friend — provided that friend owned a credit card reader and didn’t mind paying a few percentage points in fees or waiting a couple of days for the payment to process.

Ivey got around that problem by using PayPal. Since 1998, PayPal had enabled people to transfer money to each other instantly. For the most part, its powers were confined to eBay, the online auction company that purchased PayPal in 2002. But last summer, PayPal began giving a small group of developers access to its code, allowing them to work with its super-sophisticated transaction framework. Ivey immediately used it to link users’ Twitter accounts to their PayPal accounts, and his new company, Twitpay, took off. Today, the service has almost 15,000 users.

That may not sound like much, but it sends a message: Moving money, once a function managed only by the biggest companies in the world, is now a feature available to any code jockey. Ivey is just one of hundreds of engineers and entrepreneurs who are attacking the payment ecosystem, seeking out ways small and large to tear down the stronghold the banks and credit card companies have built.

You'll notice that the article emphasizes how these innovations will affect the formal money transfer market. I'm more interested in how they may affect the informal but potent hawala system of money transfers between workers in the Arab Gulf and their families in Pakistan, India, etc.