This concept note examines how the European Union’s evolving financial architecture has turned funding into a central tool for governing return and readmission beyond its borders. Tracing four phases from the 1990s to the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, it shows how external migration funding grew from fragmented development aid into a consolidated, conditional system centred on instruments such as AMIF, BMVI, trust funds, and especially NDICI–Global Europe. A multi-level analysis of €35.6 billion in migration and border-management spending, including 221 NDICI–GE projects, finds that the bulk of resources prioritises control, containment, and return over protection, legal pathways, and reintegration, often under humanitarian framing. The note argues that this “financialisation” of externalisation embeds EU return and readmission priorities in third countries’ migration infrastructures, while raising serious concerns about transparency, accountability, and the marginalisation of rights-based objectives.