Western Union Teams Up With Facebook Messenger For Global Money Transfers

Score another win for Facebook with Western Union’s latest announcement at the social media giant’s F8 annual developer conference.

As we’ve reported, there have been various companies partnering up with Facebook’s Messenger lately to help enhance customer service and purchasing methods.

While companies like American Express are installing new bots for customer service, Western Union is taking its Facebook integration to a new level. The global payments company announced its development of a money transfer bot for Facebook’s Messenger. Through this offering, Facebook users from around the world will be able to send friends and family money to over 200 countries in 130 different currencies.

Founded in 1851, Western Union’s ability to move money around the world is one of the most historically used methods. With 1.2 billion people using Messenger on a monthly basis, this move represents a big step forward for Western Union. U.S. Facebook users are the first to have access to Western Union’s digital and retail cross-border monetary transfer platform.

Western Union’s president of global money transfer, Odilon Almedia, commented in a release about the new offering. He said, “Western Union’s global money movement platform — trusted by millions of customers worldwide — can now be accessed through the world’s largest social network platform by users in the U.S., enabling convenience, access and simplicity to further connect individuals and communities all over the world. The Messenger platform allows Western Union to interact with our U.S. customers where they are, when they need us, in the most natural conversational way.”

This new money transfer bot is likely to spark competition with other digital finance companies like PayPal and Venmo. As Western Union is the first to make the move to Messenger integration, the next part of the puzzle may be whether or not similar companies follow in their footsteps.