The Western Union Company (WU), a leader in global payment services, extended its exclusive agreement with Eurogiro, with scope to allow its members greater access to the full range of Western Union Money Transfer® services including digital offerings.
Eurogiro is a global payment network for national postal organisations, post banks, commercial banks and other payment service providers. The agreement extends a 16-year collaboration.
Eurogiro offers the exclusive Western Union® money-in-minutes service – as part of a portfolio of cross border payment services to 35 of its members. These members represent 52,000 Agent locations across 30 countries.
Odilon Almeida, President, Americas and European Union, said: “The extension of this long tenured relationship is a testament to the value brought by Western Union to Eurogiro’s members, banks, post offices and payment providers in major regional hubs across the world.
“Western Union’s global footprint of nearly half a million locations connects Eurogiro’s member institutions to every corner of the world - urban and rural.
“Working together – we are keen to enhance services to Eurogiro's members to facilitate more choice as consumer preference for both cash and cashless money transfers grows.”
Today, Western Union is harnessing its system with modifications to link cash and digital transfers between retail Agent locations, mobile phones, prepaid cards, online and traditional bank accounts and ATM.
“While cash has a strong preference to instantly fund spending; some of our existing customers as well as new customers have evolving preferences. They also want choice of cashless transactions with the same speed of money-in-minutes,” said Almeida.
Eurogiro was founded by a group of European postal organizations focused on improving cross-border payments for customers, providing connectivity and payment services to its membership community of financial institutions.
Michel Stuijt, Eurogiro CEO, said, “This agreement honors the great contributions over the years by Eurogiro members to Western Union in attractrogiro members to Western Union in attracting and servicing customers with a need to send or to collect funds wherever they are.
“The Western Union urgent cash service has been a premium and highly valued addition to the basic services which Eurogiro members have in their payment portfolio. We have a common goal of providing excellent services to non-banked people and maintaining a dense branch network close to the customers in both urban and rural areas all over the world,” he added.
The Western Union global money transfer platform moved an average of 29 transactions per second across the world in 2013.