EDITOR'S NOTE: In Part One, we traced the deep historical roots of Jamaica’s remittance story and the human obligations that have driven flows from Panama to Brixton to Brooklyn. In Part Two, we examine what happens when those flows move into the digital age. The counter agent who once knew every customer by name is being replaced by an app. Correspondent banks threatened to sever entire Caribbean corridors. And a television programme that once united families across oceans is now competing with social media. The question at the heart of this instalment is whether the intimacy at the center of remittances, the dignity, the story behind the transfer, can survive the transition. The people building that future believe it can.

Even formal systems proved vulnerable, however. In the early 2010s, diaspora senders began to notice something was wrong. Transfers that had moved reliably for years suddenly slowed. Accounts were frozen. Familiar institutions stopped accepting remittances from Caribbean corridors. Behind these disruptions was a crisis known as de-risking: major correspondent banks in the United States, Canada and Britain had begun cutting ties with Caribbean financial institutions, citing compliance costs and concerns around money laundering.

For Jamaican families dependent on those flows, this was no technical banking adjustment. It was a threat to the lifeline itself. The informal networks of an earlier era had already been stretched to their limits. Now the formal ones were at risk of unravelling too.