The Western Union Company WU

The business

Western Union moves money across borders for people, not companies: a worker in Dallas or Dubai sends a few hundred dollars home to family in Mexico, the Philippines, or Nigeria, and WU takes a fee of a few percent. The engine is the Consumer Money Transfer franchise built on roughly 400,000 retail agent locations across 200-plus countries, still weighted toward cash handed over a counter; a growing digital business (app and web) sits alongside it, plus a small Consumer Services segment (bill pay, retail FX, prepaid). The cash-corridor franchise carries nearly all the economics today, and it is the part in structural decline as remittances shift to app-first competitors and, at the margin, stablecoin rails.

What the financials don't show: WU's customers are migrant workers, so volumes track immigration policy and enforcement, not GDP. Two policy shocks hit at once in 2026: tighter US immigration enforcement and the 1% US excise tax on cash-funded remittances that took effect in January under the 2025 tax law, both leaning on the US-to-Latin-America corridor that is WU's largest. Against that, management is buying Intermex (IMXI, ≈$500M cash), the strongest US-to-Mexico specialist, and launched USDPT, a dollar stablecoin issued by Anchorage Digital Bank on Solana, in early May 2026, with a consumer spend product planned for 40-plus countries this year.