"Improving legal and regulatory frameworks as well as the financial and payment infrastructure is certainly important in leading financial service providers to design and offer a variety of products in the market" stated the Director of the Swiss Cooperation Office Kosovo, Patrick Etienne. However, this is not sufficient. Work need to be done also with the service users, in terms of improving their knowledge of financial products and services, and to improve their capability of using these services.
These important priorities are being addressed with the support of the Remittances and Payments Program (RPP), financed by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO).
The SECO funded RPP makes remittances payment options transparent and contributes to reducing costs and hurdles to remittance payments. Making these payments more efficient means making services cheaper and more easily accessible for migrants and their families. This should translate into higher disposable income for them. The support also sensitizes the remittance receivers and senders to use the real system for transfer instead of carrying along the cash, which, as we know, entails considerable risks for the sender.
Facilitating remittance flows has the potential of yielding significant development results, as the magnitude of remittance flows worldwide are far larger than Official Development Assistance and Foreign Direct Investment.
RPP is a regional program, currently active in Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, and Ukraine and is implemented by the World Bank Group.