> If they were concerned about remittance fees they could just set up a bank in the US with low fees, instead of getting kickbacks from OCGs and Western Union / Money Gram etc.
Can you elaborate? With remittance there is people with physical cash in tens of different local currencies and countries, and they need to transfer that value to some other (obscure) country. I don't see any scenario how "just set up a bank in the US" is going anywhere near in fixing that problem.
Most of the money is coming from El Salvadorians in the US, and as El Salvador uses the US Dollar as currency, that would be fairly straightforward. Even from, e.g. Mexican pesos, it would be simple because the USD is the destination currency. It would be a different proposition if we were talking about, e.g., Indians.
Can you elaborate? With remittance there is people with physical cash in tens of different local currencies and countries, and they need to transfer that value to some other (obscure) country. I don't see any scenario how "just set up a bank in the US" is going anywhere near in fixing that problem.