[2018-12-22]Western Union is Ready for Crypto Use in its Payment & Transfer Serv

[Vladdirescu87]

Western Union is Ready for Crypto Use in its Payment & Transfer Services

The American-based leading financial services firm, Western Union, is now more than ready to start using cryptos for payments. Odilon Almeida, the president of Western Union, revealed in a video interview with Reuters Plus, that the financial institution has been evaluating and ascertaining the deployment of digital currency. They are further delving into ways through which the service delivery using distributed ledger technology (DLT) can be improved. Western Union, founded in 1851, operates in more than 200 nations across the globe.

Read the details in the article of Coinidol dot com, the world blockchain news outlet: https://coinidol.com/western-union-ready-for-crypto-use-in-payment-transfer-services/

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[veleten]

this is ,actually , huge for adoption
people in many countries rely on Western Union to send money abroad , despite WU's outrageous fees
I've seen people transfer 500$ paying like 30$ or similar for the transaction
interested in how Western Union is planning to charge for using crypto? will it be their commission on top of a tx fee?
but this makes WU redundant in this chain, people can manage sending crypto without their "helpful" service

[1Referee]

The headline is a bit misleading.

“Western Union is ready today to adopt any kind of currency. We already operate with 130 currencies. If we one day feel like it’s the right strategy to introduce cryptos to our platform, technology-wise it’s just one more currency. I think crypto may become one more option of currency, or assets, around the world to be exchanged between people and businesses. If that happens, we will be ready to launch.”

If you read further, it becomes clear that as long as crypto isn't ready to the degree they want it to be ready, and there isn't much that I can blame them for right now.

It's interesting to see that they haven't done anything with XRP yet, while it's by far one of the fastest and easy to scale networks due to its centralized nature. Their point is that there hasn't been much of an advantage, which is quite funny actually. If XRP can't provide what you want it to provide, how on earth will decentralized cryptos do it?

It could be that XRP isn't interesting enough to attract a whole lot of new users and they rather wait for the more decentralized ones with their limitations to speed up a bit.

[btyco]

XRP was rumoured to be the crypto that western union was going to use but they haven't confirmed that yet. I doubt it will be xrp though, most likely their own creation or a stable coin

[rodskee]

Almost everyday this month of december there have a good news all about from big firm and businesses
Adopt bitcoin or create currency hope this continues adoption can guve posituve effect for the entire crypto community

[Kakmakr]

Western Union and MoneyGram and most of these currency exchanges has been exploiting people with high fees for many years now and we have hoped that Bitcoin would disrupt their business, but now they have found a way to sidestep the disruption by cannibalizing the feature that would have disrupted them. <lower tx fees>

My prediction will be that they would utilize Blockchain technologies to stay competitive in the market, but that the reduction in their overheads would just go to their shareholders and not to the people who use their services. <They just want more profits> 

[Lucius]

this is ,actually , huge for adoption
people in many countries rely on Western Union to send money abroad , despite WU's outrageous fees
I've seen people transfer 500$ paying like 30$ or similar for the transaction
interested in how Western Union is planning to charge for using crypto? will it be their commission on top of a tx fee?
but this makes WU redundant in this chain, people can manage sending crypto without their "helpful" service

I'm not sure is there is any other similar money transfer service which has higher fees than WU. I live in EU, and if I want to send someone money inside my country, for 1000 Euros fee is around 50 Euros. So compared with BTC in worst days of high fees, this is just very expensive service.

Regarding their move in cryptocurrency payments, it is difficult to imagine how this would work. Maybe something in a way user send some coin using WU service and recipient get fiat. Otherwise I do not see why someone would send crypto by using their service instead of directly without intermediaries.

[milewilda]

this is ,actually , huge for adoption
people in many countries rely on Western Union to send money abroad , despite WU's outrageous fees
I've seen people transfer 500$ paying like 30$ or similar for the transaction
interested in how Western Union is planning to charge for using crypto? will it be their commission on top of a tx fee?
but this makes WU redundant in this chain, people can manage sending crypto without their "helpful" service

I'm not sure is there is any other similar money transfer service which has higher fees than WU. I live in EU, and if I want to send someone money inside my country, for 1000 Euros fee is around 50 Euros. So compared with BTC in worst days of high fees, this is just very expensive service.

Regarding their move in cryptocurrency payments, it is difficult to imagine how this would work. Maybe something in a way user send some coin using WU service and recipient get fiat. Otherwise I do not see why someone would send crypto by using their service instead of directly without intermediaries.

Its actually redundant yet sending crypto to another user is easy as 1-2-3 without the need of these service. What they do think off on accepting crypto into their service?
They wont surely benefit since most people do know the fees between solely sending on their own or using up WU to sent out the funds they do like to pass.
Its no clear on how this thing would be beneficial to them.

[kenzawak]

I heard they were doing tests with XRP but yeah the title is a bit misleading.
Actually there is new competition with Facebook. There is a rumor that thay want to use the Ziliqa blockchain to create their own stablecoin and use it for money transfers on whatsapp :

https://ethereumworldnews.com/exploring-the-speculation-that-facebook-is-building-on-the-zilliqa-zil-network/

Maybe the competition between these two giants will speed things up.

[LeGaulois]

Western Union and MoneyGram and most of these currency exchanges has been exploiting people with high fees for many years now and we have hoped that Bitcoin would disrupt their business, but now they have found a way to sidestep the disruption by cannibalizing the feature that would have disrupted them. <lower tx fees>

My prediction will be that they would utilize Blockchain technologies to stay competitive in the market, but that the reduction in their overheads would just go to their shareholders and not to the people who use their services. <They just want more profits> 

Western Union is the leader for money transfers, even institutions use it via WUBS. The company don't really need to stay competitive it's so well established. The strong point of Western Union has always been its technology for communication so you may be somehow right, maybe it will just adapt its technology with the use of the blockchain tech. and it will be what make the company still competitive...

[magneto]

Western Union is Ready for Crypto Use in its Payment & Transfer Services

The American-based leading financial services firm, Western Union, is now more than ready to start using cryptos for payments. Odilon Almeida, the president of Western Union, revealed in a video interview with Reuters Plus, that the financial institution has been evaluating and ascertaining the deployment of digital currency. They are further delving into ways through which the service delivery using distributed ledger technology (DLT) can be improved. Western Union, founded in 1851, operates in more than 200 nations across the globe.

I remember a lot of the infographics that were previously shown with a side to side comparison of the traits of bitcoin vs. WU, which obviously showed the superiority of bitcoin in terms of the convenience, cost, and security of transferring wealth from person to person globally.

It's interesting to see now that they are trying to integrate bitcoin into their services.

Again, this is acknowledging that bitcoin does have significant merits which can be used by financial institutions across the world, to facilitate global transactions or settlements. This is exactly what WU is interested in taking advantage of, right now. It still remains unknown though how exactly they plan on using bitcoin, whether treating it as a foreign currency which people can send overseas, or a means of transferring wealth outside of the SWIFT/SEPA framework. Either way, it's encouraging to see.

[BitHodler]

Western Union is the leader for money transfers, even institutions use it via WUBS. The company don't really need to stay competitive it's so well established. The strong point of Western Union has always been its technology for communication so you may be somehow right, maybe it will just adapt its technology with the use of the blockchain tech. and it will be what make the company still competitive...

Being the leader in an industry doesn't mean you don't have to do your best to continuously provide the best possible services. In all fairness, with crypto in the picture their business model looks pretty fragile.

I strongly hope that there will be more competition in that sector, because more competition means better overall services at lower cost. Crypto provides new players all the tools to at least try their luck and gain market share.

What concerns me isn't that existing financial services won't be using blockchain, because they certainly will, but the point that the end user isn't going to benefit from it. They'll probably keep the benefits to themselves.

[figmentofmyass]

It's interesting to see that they haven't done anything with XRP yet, while it's by far one of the fastest and easy to scale networks due to its centralized nature. Their point is that there hasn't been much of an advantage, which is quite funny actually. If XRP can't provide what you want it to provide, how on earth will decentralized cryptos do it?

if there were an ecosystem built around ripple, it might be useful to them. but there isn't.

the strength of any blockchain is cutting out middlemen which add time and fees. western union might be able to use ripple or a similar protocol to make cheap intra-network transfers, but to actually pay their customers real money they'd need to constantly deposit and withdraw fiat money from third party exchanges. their customers want real USD, not USD tokens on ripple.

and that's no cheaper than the banking system.....

[timerland]

I don't see any solid evidence available here that would suggest they are actually trying to adopt bitcoin in any way. Rather, they are simply saying that they may be interested in using blockchain as a technology in order to process transactions, or potentially launch their own global token.

Thus, there is no real positive connection of this to bitcoin. They're still going to be probably continuing to charge people high fees to do their global transfers (that's what they do for a living), and are still going to be competing against bitcoin.

Adopting a centralized crypto of some sort could work out for them, or perhaps they could potentially even look into stablecoins. Their ultimate goal as others have said is profit maximization, not to support decentralization.

[greeklogos]

I do not know how this News can support popularization of bitcoin. Nobody in my circle use or ever used Western Union's services, so will they work with crypto or will not doesn't play any role to the biggest number of people by my modest calculations. Who use WU at all?! People from poor countries who work abroad and send money to their families, I guess the number of such people is not so big in the whole mass and I believe that taxes of the service for such kind of transactions won't be small, so people will continue to use checked methods of crypto transfer like from a wallet to wallet with just couple cents per the transaction fee.

[Slow death]

[...]

they know that cryptos are popular, but they also know they can not use cryptos because of lack of regulations, so for they do not stay behind, they are talking about what most people in the crypto world like to hear, look what they said:

Odilon pointed out the imperfections and restrictions of cryptoassets and the reasons why they haven’t registered conventional adoption. Among the restrictions include; governance, compliance and volatility.

It's clear that they will not use cryptos as early

[pixie85]

How is that big? Cryptocurrencies are allowing people to pay directly with no third party fees. How does WE make money on it? They will have to add their own fees. Who is going to use WE when they can send cryptocurrencies themselves, unless... WE will use crypto as transfer vehicle and charge fees on that. Somebody wants to send USD to Africa? WE will buy crypto, send crypto, exchange crypto to fiat in Africa, charge fees. Somebody wants to make money on people unaware of the existence of cryptocurrencies.

[gabbie2010]

Adoption of Cryptos by Western Union for money transfer is long overdue this will enable transparency and swiftness with a reduction in transaction cost, I belief introduction of Cryptos as a virtual currency is a challenge to money transfers organizations and will probably checkmate their excessiveness thereby bringing in a competitive money transfer mechanism.