Western Union to test digital initiatives in PH

MULTINATIONAL financial services company Western Union (WU) has laid down five strategies in which the company will focus on in order to drive the business forward, said by its global chief Devin McGranahan.

In a media roundtable with reporters, Jean Claude Farah, WU Middle East and Asia-Pacific president, discussed the initiatives of which one of them is for the Philippines to be used as a “launching pad or test case” for the other four.

“We will be taking the Philippines as a pilot or a start and will be the pillar of the other strategies, as the country is ranked high in receiving remittances. If it works here, then we will apply it somewhere else,” Farah exclaimed.

As per the World Migration Report 2022, the Philippines is ranked fourth in remittance recipients.

Farah said that WU will refocus retail transactions in order to possibly reach out to more customers, accelerate the company’s digital growth to create an “ecosystem” for the company and for WU to attempt to become an omnichannel.

“Our services used to be mostly about retail and all about physical locations. But once the pandemic hit, we shifted to digital ways, and this actually helped WU and the remittance sector overall grow by leaps and bounds. But now that restrictions are slowly going away, we wish to capture more customer traffic by combining both retail and digital means,” Farah explained.

For the next strategy that is about accelerating digital growth, he said this refers to all aspects such as connecting to various electronic wallets (GCash, and the like), improving electronic transactions, cybersecurity, among others.

“In the Philippines, we are able to deposit money in more than 95 percent of the bank accounts in the country. With this alone, the Philippines is scoring very well and allowed us to connect to all of our customers’ e-wallets. We want it to be known that this market is solid and that our strategy is embodied and embraced fully,” Farah said.

Lastly, for the “ecosystem” and omnichannel strategies, Farah elaborated that WU wishes to increase engagement with the customers and wants to be remembered besides as the firm where everyone goes to for remittances. He said the company wants to try to become as a corridor of sorts for overall payment and a portal where customers can jump or engage their stores of choice once they are done with transactions.

“Every company wants to create an ‘ecosystem’ or ‘super app’ now as they want customers to use their services more than once. Moving forward, we want everyone to know that we will try to engage customers even more on the receiving end in order to establish an ecosystem where the receivers will be able to use more of our services,” Farah said.