Western Union Brings Mobile Remittance Through Union Bank Platform

Western Union has tied up with UnionBank to integrate the digital money transfer tools into the mobile app belonging to the latter and this has been introduced in the Phillippines for the first time.

With this integration, the users in the country would be able to receive Western Union payments by entering the unique code of their payments within the UnionBank mobile app. Previously, users would need to visit the Western Union office to perform these functions and receive their payments but this partnership would help the users to get the payments directly into their UnionBank accounts using the mobile app.

“Our long-standing relationship with Western Union is powered by our joint commitment to serve our customers to the best of our capability,” said Ian Ocampo, president, and CEO, PETNET Inc., in the joint announcement. “Customers want choice, speed, and reliability, and with Western Union, we are glad to drive innovation and explore new opportunities serving the end-user.”

The companies have launched this only in Phillippines for now but they hope to extend this service to all the customers of Western Union in due course of time. Ideally, they would like to make this service available in over 150 countries across billions of customers but we would have to wait and see how the users adopt this model of payments and this would be known in the coming months. This is just another example of how digitalization is taking over the payments industry and each player has been forced to come up with innovations and new features to keep pace.

“We are pleased that this integration with Western Union enables us to come together to do more and deliver better banking experiences to customers through seamless digital money transfers,” said Ana A. Delgado, chief digital channels officer, and chief customer experience officer of UnionBank, in the joint announcement.

Digital money transfers have been much sought after by users, both retail and businesses, for their speed and reliability, and with the pandemic also forcing people inside their homes and making them shift to digital payments even for their basic requirements, that habit seems to be continuing even after the pandemic has receded. This is likely to make all the legacy systems obsolete in the long term which is why all the financial firms are rushing towards digitization.