Podcasts

[podcast] Why a 164 year old payments giant partnered with the hottest social media tool on the planet

Zack Miller | December 04, 2015

One of the themes we’re tracking here at Tradestreaming is the confluence of incumbent financial institutions with new technologies, platforms, and tools. When you look at some of the largest and oldest financial institutions, some are indeed embracing the future.

Western Union is one of those firms. You’re probably familiar with the fact that Western Union provides consumers and businesses with a variety of ways to send and receive money around the world. Through multiple brands , the company, which is 164 years old, has built a combined network of over 500,000 agent locations in 200 countries and territories and over 100,000 ATMs and kiosks, giving it the capability to send money to hundreds of millions of accounts. In 2014, The Western Union Company completed 255 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide, moving $85 billion of principal between consumers, and 484 million business payments.

The scale is pretty staggering and what’s interesting is how the firm is embracing some of the same tools its customers are using. A recent study by McKinsey estimated that by 2020, 12% of global remittances will be initiated via social media and communications platforms. To this end, earlier in the fall, Western Union launched the WUConnect service, which opens Western Union’s internal transaction processing network to platforms that want to offer social and text payment capabilities to their own customers.

The company created application programming interfaces and a software developer’s kit to let social networks, like Facebook, access the service. And just a couple of weeks ago, the company announced that WeChat, the Chinese communications platform, is rolling out an integration that would enable its 650M active users to send money to one another over the WU Connect service.

David Thompson, Western Union’s Chief Information Officer, joins us today on the Tradestreaming Podcast to discuss how his firm views the convergence of social, technology, and finance and how he’s helped manage the internal processes to ensure Western Union stays competitive and relevant throughout the evolution of today’s technology.

Listen to the FULL episode

What you’ll hear in this week’s podcast:

The inherent socialness of payments and why it makes sense for apps/social platforms to offer peer to peer payments
WUConnect, Western Union’s API / SDK suite to integrate cross-border payments into social media networks
What’s driving the partnership with WeChat, China’s leading social media communications platform with 650M monthly users
How payments can drive additional stickiness to large social platforms
Strategy drill-down on Western Union’s global leadership in cross-border and digital payments
How Western Union’s competitiveness is driven by a large investment in regulatory compliance in 200 countries around the world
David’s view on the challenges in cross-border, cross-currency money transfer and what he and Western Union have done to solve for these
Why McKinsey believes that by 2020, 12% of global remittances will be initiated via social media and messaging platforms
What David has planned for new types of partnerships in 2016 as well as new functionality slated to be launched as part of WUConnect

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