Visa forms strategic partnership with Western Union
Visa has established a new strategic agreement with Western Union, a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement.
Western Union will implement Visa Direct – Visa’s real-time push payments platform – to bring speed and transparency to the process of sending money around the world.
“Together, Visa Direct and Western Union are collaborating with plans to scale real-time cross-border payments to businesses and consumers in more than 200 countries and territories, in more than 130 currencies,” said Bill Sheley, global head of push payments at Visa.
Once Western Union’s implementation of Visa Direct is live, Western Union will be able to offer customers an expedited remittance service onto cards with more transparency and an enhanced user experience for both senders and receivers.
“Western Union has the largest money transfer retail network and this agreement represents a key milestone for our account pay-out network combining the best of Visa and Western Union’s cross-border capabilities to enable a world-class payments platform,” said Jean Claude Farah, executive vice president at Western Union.
In 2018, Western Union completed more than 800 million transactions for consumer and business, as nearly $80 trillion of money is sent via a wire transfer or bank account globally daily. However, the process is hard and complex, with money taking days to arrive, caused by outdated, multi-step, costly methods.
This collaboration reinforces Visa’s commitment to modernise how payments are made around the world. In addition to this new collaboration, last month Visa announced the acquisition of control of Earthport, a company that provides cross-border payment services.
The acquisition of Earthport is an extension of Visa’s overall cross-border strategy that’s complementary to Visa Direct and Western Union’s existing partnerships.
