Western Union’s Digital Business Sees 15% Growth in Transactions

Western Union’s Branded Digital business saw 15% growth in transactions and 9% growth in revenue on a reported basis in the third quarter.

This marked the sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit transaction growth for the Branded Digital business, the company said in a presentation released Wednesday (Oct. 23) in conjunction with its quarterly earnings call.

The Branded Digital business now accounts for 32% of Western Union’s Consumer Money Transfer (CMT) transactions and 25% of its revenues, according to a Wednesday earnings release.

“Over the past year, we have been focused on improving the onboarding experience, driving marketing effectiveness, improving our market value proposition and our overall user experience,” Devin McGranahan, president and CEO of Western Union, said of the digital business while speaking Wednesday during the earnings call. “We’ve also been rolling out our new digital experience, which is now in over a dozen countries around the world.

“I’m happy to report that these efforts are translating into more customers, more transactions and now more revenue,” McGranahan added.

The growth of the digital business came during a quarter in which Western Union’s total revenue decreased 6% on a reported basis, per the release.

The company attributed the decline to lower contribution from Iraq compared with the same quarter last year. Excluding Iraq, Western Union saw positive adjusted consolidated revenue growth of 1%.

Western Union reported in July that it had been impacted by sanctions placed on 14 Iraqi banks.

In its retail business, the company has been making point-of-sale (POS) improvements over the past year to improve speed, reliability, agent support and customer experience, McGranahan said during the call.

The latest step in these efforts is a new iteration of Western Union’s POS system that moves many processes from agent hardware, where they have traditionally run, to the cloud. This enables the company to accelerate both the rollout of improvements and the core processing times, McGranahan said.

“In the third quarter of this year, on this new platform, we completed a speed test in Spain and we were able to complete a resend transaction in just over one minute — which is a dramatic improvement from where we were just a year ago,” McGranahan said.