WU and Mobile Payments, Closer Look

While some might have been concerned about Western Union’s overall status as a company with potential new taxes coming to cash remittances going to Mexico to pay for a giant new wall—which may or may not ever actually happen—those concerns are about to prove largely invalid.

Western Union is branching out, and getting into mobile payments with a new strategic investment in mobile wallet service Walletron.

Walletron is known for its work in mobile wallet bill presentment, as well as in bill payment options, two fields that could give Western Union a real leg up in the field. In fact, Walletron has previously been seen working to automate brand presence in mobile wallet systems, not only driving engagement on the bill recipient’s part, but also offering billers access to a new bill-to-wallet solution called moBills.

Using moBills offers a way to let users access a current slate of bills that’s been routed through the moBills card, and then, to use other payment systems in the mobile wallet to pay the bills in question.

Mobile bill payment options are proving increasingly popular with millennial users, and a recent study from Western Union underscored this point. Its 2016 Money Mindset Index revealed that 27 percent of all consumers were planning to pay more bills via mobile device, and 48 percent of millennials were planning to do likewise.

This is actually the latest step in a broader process; reports note that Western Union’s connection to moBills and Walletron goes back to August, where a commercial alliance had been announced to put this technology in place later on.

Diversification is seldom a bad idea, unless it’s taken to extremes. This doesn’t sound like such a case, so the good news here is that this will likely go well for Western Union. With a potential hit coming to a fairly substantial part of its business, having some extra ready to go in the background could help turn a big hit into a small glitch in the system. Good news by any standard.

It’s going to be interesting to see how well this works in the weeks to come; right now, Western Union may be filling in a gap its customers want filled, and that’s seldom a bad place to be.