In bringing the book to a close, this concluding chapter summarises the main findings of the research underpinning Migrants and their money before considering its wider implications. Thus far, the book has detailed the dominance of finance in the UK, which is the outcome of extensive neoliberal restructuring of the British economy and state. These processes of financialisation have been accompanied by ,and shaped the nature and scope of, financial exclusion, as particular peoples and places have been pushed to the fringes of financial circuits because of a complex intersection of marginality. Furthermore, given the penetration of finance into all reaches of economic and social life, the consequences of financial exclusion have been shown to be not only severe and multifaceted, but also reinforcing of broader processes of socioeconomic and political marginalisation thus potentially eroding the range of rights and entitlements afforded to excluded groups.

This book has demonstrated how migrant men and women, originating from five diverse countries in the global South, and East and Central Europe and confronted by the sophisticated financial landscape of London, negotiate their access to a range of banking, savings, credit and remittance services. Undoubtedly, the key financial resource for migrant men and women was banking, primarily because of the role that it played in structuring access to London's labour market and the welfare state. As demonstrated in Chapter Three, almost irrespective of the reasons why migrants had migrated to London, work – and in particular formal sector employment – assumed a special importance for many, which in turn necessitated banking access because of the declining incidence of cash wages. For those unable to work, access to welfare payments was also dependent upon having a bank account. Importantly, and reflecting the value attached to financial access in a financialised economy, a number of migrant men and women also raised the significance of banking in terms of demonstrating the legitimacy of their presence in the city as well as augmenting their social standing within their own and wider communities. Yet, this said, the fact that bank accounts predominantly served as vehicles for the receipt of wages and/or benefits was highlighted by migrants’ banking practices, on the basis of which the majority could, in fact, be categorised as ‘marginally banked’.