The Social Dynamics of Remittances

Abstract This article examines how financial technology (fintech) has reconfigured, rather than formalized, remittance practices in the South Africa–Zimbabwe corridor. Structural barriers, high costs, and exclusionary design of formal remittance systems have catalysed the emergence of socially constructed remittance containers. These containers—ranging from cash concealed in grocery parcels to digitally coordinated money-changing networks—are embedded not only within informal social relations but also within fintech infrastructures originally intended to formalize informal remittance practices. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows migrants’ engagement with fintech as neither linear nor uniformly inclusive. Instead, migrants selectively adopt, adapt, and repurpose fintech in ways shaped by legal status, economic position, and lived experience. While fintech platforms promise abstraction, efficiency, and inclusion, remittance practices remain deeply embedded in trust economies, reputational networks, and everyday improvisation. Informal channels persist not simply because formal systems are costly or inaccessible but because they offer flexibility, speed, and relative control in contexts marked by monetary instability and institutional failure. The analysis foregrounds how fintech-enabled remittance practices reconfigure the meaning of borders. Borders emerge not only as territorial lines but as dispersed regimes of financial governance that shape who can remit, how much, and through which channels. Migrants with access to fintech infrastructures participate in hybrid systems that combine formal banking in South Africa with informal money changing and livelihood making networks in both South Africa and Zimbabwe, effectively bypassing conventional border controls. In this way, fintech has not eliminated informality but reshaped it, producing new forms of embeddedness across borders.