Citi has teamed up with Brazil’s Caixa Economica Federal to tap into the flow of remittances from citizens living abroad, a flow of roughly $7bn a year. The new service, which will be available in H1 2009, is intended to boost remittances by expediting the process and reducing operating costs. “This process is in line with the policies of governments worldwide, including the Brazilian government, of encouraging the use of formal tools to transfer such resources,” says Citi, which has been in the remittance market since 2006. There are over 4m Brazilian citizens living abroad, including over 1m in the US, 320,000 in Japan and 300,000 in Europe, says Citi. Economic downturns in the US and Spain, inflation and a weaker dollar will cause a fall in money transfers from LatAm migrants for the first time this decade, according to the IDB’s MIF unit. Migrants from LatAm and the Caribbean will send some $67.5bn to their homelands in 2008, against $66.5bn in 2007, some 1.7% less year-on-year when adjusted for inflation, MIF predicted in October. Until last year, remittances to the region had grown by double digits every year, says MIF, which says this is the first drop since it started tracking these flows in 2000.