Western Union Expands Presence in the Philippines With Tie Up

The Western Union Company WU recently teamed up with TrueMoney, which is renowned as a financial services provider in the Philippines. TrueMoney — one of the largest fintech company in Southeast Asia — offers various innovative and reasonable financial services to stimulate financial inclusion across several countries.

This partnership will enable Western Union to serve customers more efficiently in the Philippines by providing its money transfer services across TrueMoney’s more than 5,000 locations.

This tie up highlights Western Union’s efforts to strengthen presence in the Philippines, which has been recognized as the fourth-largest remittance recipient country in 2019 according to the World Bank. Notably, remittances received increased by 4% to $35.2 billion in the region last year.

Notably, Western Union already has a strong network of Agent locations in the Philippines through which it has been able to serve customers efficiently. By joining forces with TrueMoney, Western Union will be able to offer more locations for engaging in money transfer services across the Philippines.

Last year, it had also tied up with Coins.ph, which is an e-wallet provider with blockchain-enabled platform in the Philippines. The collaboration intended to benefit more than five million customers, who can directly receive international and domestic money transfers into their Coins.ph wallets in the Philippines. All these initiatives, in turn, have been strengthening Western Union’s foothold in the country.

Furthermore, these efforts bode well for Western Union, considering the present situation of the remittance industry that is likely to stay under pressure due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Shares of this Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) company have gained 7.1% in a year compared with the industry’s growth of 5%. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

The price performance looks decent in comparison to other companies’ stock movement in the same space, including Repay Holdings Corporation RPAY, Global Payments Inc. GPN and Visa Inc. V. Repay, Visa and Global Payments have gained 105.7%, 8.8% and 6.7%, respectively, in a year. All the three companies carry a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Western Union has also been proactive in providing assistance to not only customers but also small businesses, which are integral to the U.S. economy and have been adversely impacted by pandemic-induced financial woes. With startups being no exception to this trend, the second class of the Techstars & Western Union Accelerator was launched last week, which is likely to provide required impetus to several startups.

This world leader in money remittance, which has a strong network spanning across more than 200 countries and territories, looks intent on assisting customers amid the ongoing market volatility induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. With customers preferring digital modes of money transfer over physical means amid the pandemic has reinforced the importance of online digital trading.

As a result, it has been striving to add customers via its digital platform across several countries globally and continues to advance digital payment modes for offering secured cross-border payment options.

We believe Western Union’s solid digital money transfer platform, which it has built on the back of massive investments and strategic alliances, has somewhat helped the company to recover amid the pandemic. Also, strong digital business, which witnessed reduced business volumes in late March and early April but somewhat bounced back in May, is likely to have driven the company’s results in second-quarter 2020, which is scheduled to release on Aug 4.

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