Earnings call transcript: Western Union Q2 2025 misses EPS forecast

Western Union Co. reported its second-quarter 2025 earnings, revealing a slight miss on both earnings per share (EPS) and revenue against forecasts. The company’s adjusted EPS stood at $0.42, falling short of the expected $0.44, marking a 4.55% negative surprise. Revenue also came in at $1.03 billion compared to the anticipated $1.04 billion, a 0.96% shortfall. The stock responded with a 1.69% drop in the regular session, closing at $8.58, and experienced a modest 0.23% uptick in after-hours trading. According to InvestingPro analysis, Western Union trades at a notably low P/E ratio of 3.13x and offers an impressive 10.96% dividend yield, having maintained dividend payments for 20 consecutive years.

Key Takeaways

• Western Union’s Q2 2025 EPS and revenue both missed forecasts.
• Stock price fell by 1.69% during the regular trading session.
• The company launched a new digital wallet and is exploring stablecoin infrastructure.
• Operating efficiency improvements saved $40 million year-to-date.
• U.S.-Mexico remittance corridor faced significant headwinds.

Company Performance

Western Union’s performance in Q2 2025 showed challenges, with a 1% year-over-year revenue decline when excluding Iraq. Consumer money transfer transactions decreased by 3%, reflecting broader market headwinds. Despite these challenges, the company maintained a 19% operating margin and continued to focus on digital innovation and operational efficiency. InvestingPro data reveals the company’s broader revenue decline of 5.15% over the last twelve months, though it maintains strong profitability with a healthy 37.79% gross margin. For deeper insights into Western Union’s financial health and future prospects, investors can access the comprehensive Pro Research Report, available exclusively on InvestingPro.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $1.03 billion, down 1% year-over-year (excluding Iraq)
• Earnings per share: $0.42, compared to $0.44 in the prior year
• Operating margin: 19%
• Cash flow from operations: $148 million year-to-date

Earnings vs. Forecast

Western Union’s Q2 2025 results fell short of analyst expectations, with an EPS of $0.42 versus a forecast of $0.44, and revenue of $1.03 billion compared to the expected $1.04 billion. This marks a deviation from previous quarters, where the company generally met or exceeded expectations.

Market Reaction

The stock’s decline of 1.69% during regular trading reflects investor disappointment with the earnings miss. However, a slight recovery in after-hours trading suggests some optimism about the company’s strategic initiatives. The stock remains within its 52-week range, with a low of $7.99 and a high of $13.12. Based on InvestingPro’s Fair Value analysis, Western Union appears undervalued at current levels, with analysts setting price targets ranging from $7.50 to $17.00. The stock’s beta of 0.68 indicates lower volatility compared to the broader market.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking forward, Western Union has set its 2025 adjusted revenue guidance between $4.035 billion and $4.135 billion, with an operating margin target of 19-21%. The company aims to achieve an adjusted EPS of $1.65-$1.75. Key strategic focuses include expanding their digital wallet offerings and exploring stablecoin infrastructure. InvestingPro analysis indicates the company maintains a "GOOD" overall financial health score, though investors should note that net income is expected to decline this year. Discover more exclusive insights and detailed financial metrics with a subscription to InvestingPro.

Executive Commentary

CEO Devin emphasized the evolving nature of global migration and the role of artificial intelligence in the company’s transformation. He stated, "We see artificial intelligence as becoming a foundational enabler of the next chapter of our transformational journey." Additionally, Devin highlighted the potential of stablecoins for treasury operations, saying, "We believe there are several opportunities worth exploring and investing in."

Risks and Challenges

• Continued decline in consumer money transfer transactions.
• Impact of U.S.-Mexico remittance corridor headwinds.
• Potential implications of a 1% remittance tax.
• Slowing digital transactions in most regions except APAC.
• Macroeconomic pressures affecting global remittance flows.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts raised questions about the impact of immigration policy changes on transaction volumes and the company’s exploration of stablecoin infrastructure. Executives also addressed concerns about the 1% remittance tax and detailed their AI implementation strategies.

Full transcript - Western Union Co (WU) Q2 2025:

Devin, CEO, Western Union: Financial results conference call. Today, we reported a reasonable quarter against a difficult macro backdrop as we continue to implement our Evolve 2025 strategy, which is focused on returning Western Union to sustainable, profitable revenue growth. Our strategy is to become a truly customer centric company by being market competitive in the most important corridors, increasing our executional rigor, and being the market leader for great omnichannel customer experiences. While we were while we are investing in this evolution, we continue to deliver above average above industry average margins, return capital to shareholders, and maintain our investment grade credit rating. We remain optimistic about the long term outlook as our investment in becoming market competitive over the past two years has provided a foundation for what we believe will be future share gains propelling revenue growth in both our retail and digital businesses.

We are also continuing to build up our consumer service business, which contributed significantly in the quarter. Our travel money business will be approaching $100,000,000 in revenue this year from nearly nothing a few years ago. For the second quarter, we reported revenue of $1,026,000,000 On an adjusted basis, and excluding the impacts from Iraq, this was a decline of 1% year over year. Overall, consumer money transfer transaction growth was down 3% in the quarter and cross border principal growth was up mid single digits on a constant currency ex Iraq basis, speaking to the resilience of our customer base and their perseverance in the current macro backdrop. While our retail business in The Americas continues to face headwinds associated with the current geopolitical environment, our retail business in Europe performed well with mid single digit transaction and revenue growth.

Our branded digital business increased transactions by 9% and adjusted revenue by 6% in the quarter. Consumer Services adjusted revenue growth was up 40% in the quarter, driven by our acquisition of EuroChange and strong European travel, which is the driver of our expanding travel money business. We expect our travel money business to have another strong quarter in Q3 as we continue to benefit from Eurochange acquisition and the summer travel season. Our adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.42 compared to $0.44 this quarter a year ago, a decent result as Q2 twenty twenty four benefited meaningfully from higher revenues and operating profits from Iraq, which were not repeated in the current quarter. Our discipline in managing costs is coming through.

Matt will discuss our second quarter financial results and 2025 outlook in more detail later in the call. Now switching to the macro environment. As you know, our core business is fundamentally linked to human mobility. When people move, whether for education, employment, or family, they rely on Western Union to send money across borders. Because of this, immigration practices and policies around the globe play a critical role in our business with both short term and long term implications.

We firmly believe that in the long term, the global mobility of people from lower productivity countries to higher productivity countries is essential if the more developed economies of the world wish to maintain their economic growth given declining birth rates and lower labor force participation rates. In the short term, such as this quarter, we can see shocks in the long term trend lines driven by changes in policies. While our global business has continued to show resilience and growth, The Americas, and particularly now The United States, have become more challenging in recent months. We have observed an increase in immigration enforcement activity, including workplace inspections and high profile raids in sectors such as agriculture, construction, and food processing. While these actions are limited in scope, the ripple effect would appear to be having an impact on our business.

They can create hesitation within immigrant communities, leading to reduced transactional activity, changes in send behavior, and or shifts towards less visible and or informal remittance channels. These developments are creating short term headwinds, especially in markets where recent enforcement efforts have been concentrated. While we remain confident in the long term resilience of these customer segments, we are seeing market level softness in some U. S. Outbound corridors.

In response, we are doubling down on our commitments to customer experience, trust and compliance. We continue to work closely with the government as well as community organizations and advocacy groups to ensure that our customers continue to have access to high quality financial services. Earlier this month, legislation was passed in The United States that included a 1% tax on remittances. This legislation will go into effect at the beginning of twenty twenty six. Generally excluded from this legislation are any remittances funded through non cash means, which excludes virtually all of our digital business in card based retail, or roughly 50% of our U.

S. CMT business today. We expect that this would limit our exposure to less than 20% of our total company revenues that are tied to U. S. Retail cash based transactions.

Looking at some of our largest retail partners in The U. S, we see debit card funding rates at 30% or even better, which causes us to believe that as debit adoption increases across our retail footprint in The U. S, our true exposure could be 15% or less of our global business. Given this, we believe a 1% remittance tax on cash based remittances is not likely to have a meaningful impact on our business going forward. That said, we are rapidly building the required infrastructure to accurately collect and remit the tax when applicable.

Our customers will have multiple options for noncash remittance transactions, including card based or bank linked transactions at most retail locations in The U. S. And on our digital platforms. This will include card acceptance at Western Union and V Go branded locations as well as through all Western Union digital offerings. U.

S. Customers can now also enroll in our V Go Money digital wallet, which offers a number of benefits, including being available as a tax free digital funding source for remittance transactions. In addition to helping our customers use the bank products that they already have, we are accelerating our efforts to enroll our customers who currently do not have these types of accounts into our digital wallet. We see this as a potential accelerant to our efforts to roll out our digital wallet in The U. S.

As our agents will now have a shared incentive to help enroll customers. The move to card funded transactions at retail could also generate cost efficiencies over time by replacing our cash handling costs with relatively lower debit fees while also reducing the high cost of cash handling that our agents bear themselves. Looking ahead, despite the near term headwinds in The Americas, the broader trends remain clear. Global migration is not slowing. It is evolving.

Whether driven by labor demand or political instability, people will continue to move, and we will continue to support them with solutions that are safe, fast, and trusted. Now, I would like to shift gears to another recent hot topic, stablecoins. Historically, we have taken a conservative view towards cryptocurrency as a legitimate alternative to more traditional cross border money movement given its historic volatility and lack of a clear regulatory framework. This position has served us well and prevented many low ROI investment that others have made. However, with the passage of the Genius Act, we are actively revising our position.

With a clear regulatory framework and guaranteed redemption value, we believe there are several opportunities worth exploring and investing in. We particularly like opportunities we see in Treasury operations with increased settlement speed and potentially lowered required partner funding requirements. Stablecoin enabled solutions have the potential to reduce friction and float, enabling faster, more efficient movement of value between our global network and local payout partners. We are actively testing programs that leverage on chain settlement rails for back end Treasury applications. The goal is to reduce dependency on legacy correspondent banking systems, shorten settlement windows, and improve capital efficiency, all without compromising compliance, transparency, or customer experience.

These innovations align closely with our broader strategy to modernize the movement of money, and we believe they could ultimately improve our ability to manage our global liquidity. In addition to treasury operations, we continue to explore opportunities to leverage Western Union’s technology and capabilities to, first, make our payments network available as an on ramp and off ramp to connect the fiat war world with the digital crypto world. Two, leverage stablecoins to enable global payments across digital channels and three, provide buysellhold capabilities to our customers to access cryptocurrencies in our digital wallets. We see that there are many near term opportunities and have been pleasantly surprised at the high level of interest in using our payments network for on and off ramps in various parts of the world. We look forward to sharing more about our plans in this exciting area at our Investor Day on November 6.

Another place where we are starting to see exciting progress is in the integration of AI capabilities into our core business processes. We see artificial intelligence as becoming a foundational enabler of the next chapter of our transformational journey. Over the past couple of quarters, we’ve accelerated the adoption of AI across our core operations and are now beginning to see tangible results. A couple of great examples include using AI powered customer service representative assistance to summarize transaction experiences indicating to the CSR where specific points of issue are and helping them identify and solve our customers’ problems without lengthy explanation. This has allowed us to lower handle times by over 50% where these CSR assistants are active, dramatically improving our customer experience.

Also in customer service, we have integrated AI into our customer service QA function, and this technology has enabled us to go from sub-one percent sampling to over 90% call sampling in the most recent period. Real time, case based feedback drives CSR learning and improvement at a much faster rate. In our tech department, we recently announced a partnership with HCL that gives us access to their GenAI platform, AI Force, which will improve workflow efficiencies across both the engineering and application maintenance activities. We now have several 100 engineers participating with code completion copilots, driving productivity and quality improvements in our software development processes. In our treasury and liquidity management operations, we are piloting AI models to better anticipate prefunding needs and optimize capital deployment across corridors.

This program will drive lower prefunding requirements and allow us to bring back more cash to our corporate treasury for strategic M and A and or return to our shareholders. With these experiences, we believe AI will enable us to continue to optimize our cost base for years to come, improving outcomes and reducing operating costs simultaneously. In conclusion, despite the current market outlook on our company, we are optimistic about the potential of our business and the platform it provides for a growing and profitable future. Our very resilient business model, with its strong cash generating characteristics, is the foundation from which we continue to improve and build upon. I look forward to coming back in the fall and sharing with you our plans for this platform and our positive outlook on the future.

I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Matt Cagwin, to discuss our financial results in more detail.

Matt Cagwin, CFO, Western Union: Thank you, Devin, and good afternoon, everyone. I’m going to walk everybody through our twenty twenty five second quarter results and our revised 2025 financial outlook. In the second quarter, GAAP revenue was $1,000,000,000 Excluding Iraq, our adjusted revenue was down 1% on a year over year basis. The decline was led by slowing in our retail business, largely driven by North America, while our branded digital and consumer services businesses continued to grow. Adjusted operating margin was 19% in both the second quarter of this year and the same period last year.

Our operating margins were negatively impacted by lower contributions from Iraq in the current period and higher consumer fraud losses, which were offset by savings from our cost redeployment program and favorable foreign currency. Adjusted EPS was 42¢ in the current period compared to 44¢ in the previous year. In addition to the items impacting adjusted operating margins, adjusted EPS was affected by higher interest expense, partially offset by fewer shares outstanding in the quarter. The adjusted effective tax rate was 16% in the quarter and in the prior year period. The adjusted effective tax rate was higher than our full year outlook due to discrete tax items in the current period.

Now turning to consumer money transfer, or CMT. Transactions declined 3% in the quarter or 2% excluding Iraq as uncertain immigration policies continue to disrupt the industry, and we are seeing shifts in our customer behavior from fewer transactions but higher average principal per transaction. Our PPT increased by over 5% in the second quarter compared to the prior year on a constant currency basis. Our branded digital business grew adjusted revenue by 6% and transactions by 9%. This marks the seventh straight quarter of solid revenue growth of mid single digit or better.

We continue to see progress in our branded digital business with strong transactions growing in The Middle East and APAC. However, we saw transactions slow from The United States to Latin America, led by U. S. To Mexico. Like the previous quarter, our branded digital revenue growth was muted by loyalty accruals, and we expect this headwind to subside in the back half this year.

We continue to see strong growth in our payout to account business. In the quarter, we grew nearly 30, and now account payouts account for almost 40% of transactions sent from our branded digital business. We continue to evaluate and expand our payout capabilities around the world as we serve the unique needs of our customer segment. The growth of our account directed payments highlights the demand for flexible, fast remittance options and comes with higher margins and a much stickier customer relationship. We also have negotiated lower account payout rates this quarter, which help achieve stable profit margins despite the tough macro environment and lower revenue.

We believe we have much more runway to go on reducing our account payout fees. Additionally, as Devin talked about, we see the new remittance taxes as an opportunity to accelerate our digital transformation and grow both the digital and wallet businesses in The United States. This reflects benefits to our customers and also gives us an opportunity to deepen our relationship with them. Now turning to our retail business. In the quarter, we continued to see weakness in North America, driven by immigration policy, which led to a slowdown in independent channel.

Growth rates in our V Go business slowed from growing double digits last year to negative in the current quarter. We believe, as we fully implement our evolve strategy here in North America, we will begin to see the results similar to those that we’re experiencing in Europe. We continue to see strength in our retail business in Europe, driven by 15 plus percent revenue growth in both Spain and The United Kingdom. In The UK, we have expanded our relationship with a UK Post, moving from a nonexclusive relationship to an exclusive one. In Spain, we’re doing many of the right things in relation to our Evolve 2025 strategy.

First, we’re benefiting from the controlled distribution network with over 60 owned and concept stores in the market. Second, a strong focus on payout to account is driving close to 80% growth in the payout to account year over year. And lastly, Spain was the initial market for our dynamic pricing model, which benefits as we leverage our scale and flexible model to capture market share. We also continue to see we also continue to believe there are numerous compelling opportunities for our retail business to recapture market share, and we look forward to sharing more about those opportunities at our upcoming Investor Day. We will continue to work on executing against these opportunities as we continue to grow our retail business.

Now transitioning to Consumer Service segment, which now accounts for 14% of total quarterly revenue. During the second quarter, adjusted revenue was up 41% driven by our Travel Money business. Consumer services accelerated since the first quarter due to the acquisition of EuroChange, which accounted for more than half our growth our bill pay business, which had stronger revenue growth in the quarter as well as our media network business, which also accelerated based on the deferred contract I talked about in the first quarter, which came through during the second quarter. Now switching briefly to our operational efficiency program. Year to date, we were able to save $40,000,000 which brings our cumulative savings to more than $150,000,000 completing our program we announced at our twenty twenty two Investor Day two years ahead of our schedule.

As Devin mentioned earlier, the recent adoption of AI is beginning to result in cost efficiencies, and we are confident that artificial intelligence will enable us to continue to optimize our cost base going forward. Now turning to our cash flow and balance sheet. We generated $148,000,000 in cash flow from operations year to date compared to $60,000,000 in the prior year period. Both years included over $200,000,000 in cash taxes related to our transition tax. I’m excited to announce that we made our final payment last quarter related to the transition tax, and as we go forward, we will no longer have this burden.

Year to date, capital expenditures were $54,000,000 or 15% lower than prior year. We remain committed to strategically investing in key areas of our business while also aligning agent compensation to our performance. Now moving on to our balance sheet. We continue to maintain a strong balance sheet with cash and cash equivalents of $1,000,000,000 and debt of $2,700,000,000 Our leverage ratios were 2.8 times and 1.8 times on a gross and net basis, which we believe provides us with ample flexibility to return capital or potential M and A while maintaining our investment grade credit rating. In the second quarter, we returned over 150,000,000 to our shareholders via dividends and share repurchases and over $300,000,000 during the first six months of the year.

This represents a cash return to our shareholders over 10% versus our current market cap in the first half this year and implies a 20% cash on cash return if we were to annualize the first half payments at our current stock price. Now moving on to our 2025 outlook, which assumes no material changes in macroeconomic conditions. Based on the tough macros and performance year to date, we are updating our 2025 guidance today, which includes adjusted revenue to be in the range of $4,035,000,000 to $4,135,000,000 This range reflects continued growth in our branded digital business, double digit growth in consumer services, as well as improvements in our retail business. We expect operating margins to be in the range of 19% to 21%. And lastly, we expect adjusted EPS to be in the range of $1.65 to $1.75 Thank you for joining the call today, and operator, ready to

Conference Operator: take questions. We will pause momentarily to compile the Q and A roster. As a reminder, each person is allowed one question with one follow-up question. All participants will be in listen only mode. Our first question comes to us from Vasu Govil from KBW.

Please ask your question.

Vasu Govil, Analyst, KBW: Hi, thanks for taking my question. Matt, maybe first one for you on just the EuroChain acquisition. I think based on what you said, I’m calculating roughly two points of contribution to revenue growth in the quarter. Is that correct? And is that trending better than I think you had anticipated roughly one point of contribution for the year?

So is it trending better than what you guys have usually thought?

Matt Cagwin, CFO, Western Union: Hey, Vasu. Thanks for the question. Thanks for joining the call today. We are super excited about the acquisition. We got them at the very beginning of this quarter.

To your question, yes, it’s about 2% of revenue in the quarter. As you work your way through the year, typically, the strongest quarter of the year is q followed by Q2 with the lighter ones being Q1 and Q4. So our one percent comment was a full year comment last quarter, and it’s going very well. We’re super excited to have the team on board. They’ve come in, added a whole bunch of additional thought leadership around the travel money business, It’s given us a whole lot more optimism and confidence in the acquisition we made and super excited we’re able to get a strong asset for a purchase price net of cash about $30,000,000.

So super excited about having it. Thanks for the question.

Vasu Govil, Analyst, KBW: Thank you very much. And just if I can ask a full quick follow-up on just the, you know, the immigration crackdown and the impact that’s having on North America. Are you seeing any mix shift to the digital channel away from retail as a result of what’s happening or is that not really something you’re seeing in the numbers?

Devin, CEO, Western Union: We are not. As evidenced by the commentary of Asu, we saw a slowdown from US to Mexico in both the retail business and the digital business. As you know, The US to Mexico corridor is the largest corridor out of The United States by a factor of almost three, and so that is a powerful driver. We did not see a material shift from retail to digital. We saw aggregate volume demands in both channels go down.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes to us from Will Nance from Goldman Sachs. Please ask your question.

Will Nance, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Just wanted to follow-up on that last point on the the deceleration in digital transactions this quarter. I I I’m frankly, if I’m wrong on this, I I thought the definition for digital is is digital on either side of the transaction. So I was just wondering if you could talk about whether, like, slowdown that you’re seeing on the digital side is for for retail originated transactions and just just maybe quantify what the exposure there is if I’m correct on that?

Matt Cagwin, CFO, Western Union: Hey, Will. This is Matt. We actually have a different definition than some of our competitors in the marketplace. We have historically used retails in it, originates in a retail location, anything and then digitals in it, originates in the digital side, whether it’s paid out in cash or paid out to account. So there is a little bit of a definitional ding thing there.

As Devin just talked about in the last question, we are seeing a slowdown in the digital US outbound into Latin America primarily into Mexico. That’s something we’re seeing in in the central banks reporting that there’s a slowdown of inbound transactions across the board. We did not experience this last quarter, but we’re starting to see a little bit of a headwind on that.

Will Nance, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Got it. No. I apologize. I guess I had that wrong.

Devin, CEO, Western Union: The other thing, Will, right, to the question you asked, right, and if you put the commentary together in payout to account, whether it was digitally originated or retail originated, We also saw a slight slowing. Historically, whether retail originated or digital originated, payout to account was running mid thirties, sometimes high thirties. In many corridors now, it’s running mid twenties to low thirties. And so even in the most digital, which is digitally originated digital payout to account, we saw a slight slowdown and we saw that slowdown in payout to account both from retail originated and digital originated almost entirely into the important lock of corridors, Mexico, Venezuela, Haiti, Guatemala, Dominican Republic. Those are the places, Colombia, Ecuador, those are the places with the biggest slowdowns.

Will Nance, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Alright. That is great. That is all great detail. Appreciate that. And then I maybe I wanted to maybe pivot to the stablecoin side.

A couple interesting tidbits you shared there. I thought the one that stood out to me the most was on kind of the on ramp on ramp off ramp solutions to kinda other third party stablecoin solutions. And I, you know, I remember that the company used to offer some white label products in the past, not so much these days, but, you know, it seems like you’re considering white labeling your on ramp off ramp to the to kind of people on the stable coin ecosystem. Can you talk about that opportunity and just spotlight, like, what are the types of corridors or the types of use cases where, you know, you guys could add the most value to people trying to operate, you know, stablecoin payments cross border? Thanks for taking the question.

Devin, CEO, Western Union: Yeah. Certainly. So, Will, as you know, the moving of stablecoins from one digital wallet to another digital wallet is pretty straightforward. The translation of that stablecoin back into a local fiat currency that someone can use to buy groceries or pay a bill is much more difficult. Our infrastructure around the world has been enabling that basically from central bank digital currency to local fiat currency for, you know, a couple of decades now.

So transitioning to be a provider of that kind of platform and in many places in the world, you know, that conversion is not the easiest thing in the world, so think in lots of places in Asia, Central America, South America, Africa, where we’ve got great capabilities and great platforms. So we’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much the phone has been ringing since Circle went public and lots of enthusiasm came into this space and are actively participating with a couple of parties now doing pilots both in South America and in Africa. So, we’ll come back to it, but we see it as a natural evolution for us given what our capabilities are around the world and the value we can provide as, you know, the payments world digitizes towards, you know, blockchain based platforms.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes to us from Ramsey El Assal from Barclays. Please ask your question.

Ramsey El Assal, Analyst, Barclays: Hi. Thanks so much for taking my question this evening. I wanted to ask about the the visibility into the some of the political headwinds that are impacting your LatAm and US Mexico business. Has the headwind kind of stabilized at this point or is it still kind of a moving target? And I guess that’s a key way of asking, could the impact worsen in the quarters ahead or are you sort of feeling like, okay, things kind of had a step function down, but now it’s just a question of sort of anniversarying the the step down?

Devin, CEO, Western Union: It is a wonderful question that I wish I could tell you a great answer to. What I can tell you is the impact we see is somewhat volatile. So June was much better than April. April was much worse than February. So was April the low point?

I don’t know. What I can tell you is increases in activity, increases in visibility, and increases in media attention all seem to have a negative correlated effect on our customers’ willingness to, you know, particularly walk into a retail location, but as we said also to a certain extent in our digital channels as well. So we’re keeping a very close eye on it. We’ve got lots of folks on the ground in the communities providing safe, secure, compliant products and services for our customers, but this is one that, you know, I think we’re going to see how it goes.

Ramsey El Assal, Analyst, Barclays: Okay. One quick follow-up for me on stablecoins. I guess the question is, what are you seeing in the marketplace in terms of demand? I know there’s a stablecoin use case where folks in emerging markets with maybe shaky financial infrastructure use it as an inflation hedge or a way to buy US dollars. Is there any organic demand you’re seeing for stablecoin utilization, or is this just more of kind of a top down we will build it in case they come type of a of a approach, basically?

Devin, CEO, Western Union: I would aggregate conversations into two parts, and Matt can talk about the second part probably at greater length than I can. The two parts are, one, the reach outs that we’re getting from what I would call platform or infrastructure providers who are assembling ways in which people can therefore then, you know, issue a stablecoin or use a stablecoin based process through a series of platforms that kind of connect all this stuff. So that’s in your category of build it and hope they come, and so we have lots of reach outs from people who would like the ability to do particularly off ramps, I guess maybe on ramps as well, but particularly off ramps in many of these countries around the world that either have currency controls or have difficulty with kind of, you know, local currency translation. The second, and this is where we’re investing a lot of our time and energy, is people who are building, in essence, b to b solutions and platforms, allowing people like us to move money around the world in a much more efficient way than the correspondent banking system. And so the more productive conversations that are translating into economic value for us is how do we enable a stable coin infrastructure for our core business, which is, you know, retail consumers either digitally or in the retail channel wanting to send money to family and friends, and then how do we make that seamless in real time for the customer regardless of the fact that we’re using a stablecoin versus a a traditional swift banking infrastructure platform.

That is probably progressing much faster, but I can let Matt talk about it.

Matt Cagwin, CFO, Western Union: Yeah. I just echo what you just said there, Devin. So we’ve got a couple different partners we’re already working with carefully right now in in Latin America in particular, where currency controls and other challenges make it easier to use a stable coin or a cryptocurrency. Ultimately, for us, is you it is real time around the world It will allow us to reduce the amount of capital we have around the world to help do payouts. So we’re super excited to find a way to make this work, have partners that are very interested in engaging with us, and and see more of a pool today than just a conversation.

Devin, CEO, Western Union: That’s a great anecdote. Matt and I were chatting this morning. You know, over the weekend, one of our significant banking partners in India ran short of cash. We had some added volume that we didn’t anticipate, and so we had some delayed payments over the weekend because by the time we were able to move money to India to top up our partner there, we weren’t able to provide as timely a service for our customers. In a stablecoin world, Matt could make that happen 24 by seven.

As soon as we saw the ability for the partner to make outbound payments reduced by prefunding levels, he could just top up in real time with a stablecoin.

Jamie Friedman, Analyst, Susquehanna: Very helpful. Thank you.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes to us from Rayna Kumar from Oppenheimer. Please ask your question. Reyna, please ask your question.

Rayna Kumar, Analyst, Oppenheimer: Hi, sorry, I was on mute. Thanks for taking my question. Just given the tightening U. S. Immigration policy and we’ll probably be in this environment for at least the next three point five years, do you think you have to tweak your Evolve 2025 strategy at all?

Devin, CEO, Western Union: We are very committed to the strategy. We believe that our customers are resilient. We believe that the vast majority of our customers are productive members of the societies in which they have chosen to join around the world, including here in The United States. Recall that in order to send money home, one needs to have money in the first place, which means you likely have a job, you have food on your table, over your head before you choose to send money home. We are going to remain committed to that customer and as this policy and process evolves, we believe that things will stabilize.

You know, on any given day, we’re still sending, you know, nearly a 100,000 transactions to Mexico. It’s just not growing ten, twelve, fifteen percent like it has been the last couple of years. So I think we will likely see less growth over the next couple of years with the current policies and approaches than maybe we have in the last couple of years, particularly here in The US, but we don’t think it fundamentally changes the core intrinsics of the product we offer, the stability of the market, or the nature of the opportunity. As you know, we’ve evolved the strategy to also include consumer services, and so we will be placing a greater emphasis on driving non remittance based products and services. In the prepared comments, I talked about the rollout of our digital wallet, which includes, you know, a debit product, a bill payment product, and the ability to do, you know, fee free P2P wallet to wallet within The United States, rolling out products and services like that more rapidly in The U.

S. Will obviously become a greater priority as we see the top level line growth of the core remittance product slowly stabilize.

Rayna Kumar, Analyst, Oppenheimer: Thanks for the insights there. And then just one follow-up for me. Just on the comments you made on the 1% remittance tax, you make a case for increased debit usage. I’m just curious for customers, you know, that have a debit card, wouldn’t you anticipate them just using digital means to transfer money rather than using a debit card right at the retail location?

Devin, CEO, Western Union: You know, interestingly, the retail value proposition is sometimes about cash, but most of the time it’s not actually about cash, and as I said, some of our big national grocery store chains already have 40% debit enablement, and so we recently did a customer survey with a group of U. S. Retail customers to try to get a better read on this, and over two thirds of them indicate that they will remain in the retail channel and use a debit card. The convenience, the familiarity, the language, the certainty, in some cases, the paper receipt that they have as evidence that they sent the money is valuable to them versus trying to enable a digital app or send money digitally.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes to us from Tim Chiodo from UBS. Please ask your question.

Tim Chiodo, Analyst, UBS: Great. Thank you for taking the question. Two brief ones actually. One is during the prepared remarks, you made a couple of comments around fraud losses in the quarter. I just wanted to see if you could bring that to life a little bit.

What is the scenario in which that happens or happened? And then a general question around large partners with any contract renewals that might be coming up that we should be aware of, either exclusive deals that could be renegotiated, etcetera, if there’s anything on the horizon that we should be thinking about. Thank you.

Matt Cagwin, CFO, Western Union: Awesome, Tim. Hey. Thanks for joining the call today. I’ll tackle the first one and Devin will take the second one. But on the fraud loss side, we, during the quarter, early June, implemented a new real time payment network.

When that happened, we ended up having a duplicate payment challenge. We’ve been working to recover those funds, not material, but we thought it was important enough to call out. As you could see, we’re still able to maintain our 19% margins. So not a big deal, but an item that we’re working our way through.

Devin, CEO, Western Union: As you know, particularly in The US, though it’s true all all over the world, Western Union has historically enjoyed a preeminent position with the largest retailers and postal systems. In any given year, there’s any series of renewals that come up. I think now we’re through all of the ones for 2025. I’m pleased that we’ve renewed I don’t know, Matt. We probably renewed twelve, fifteen Over a dozen.

Over a dozen of the large strategic partnerships in The US, including grocery store chains, major check cashers, other everyday financial service providers. As we noted in the prepared comments, we renewed with the UK Post taking that relationship exclusive and we continue, you know, to look forward to renewals with postal systems in Spain, Australia, and other countries around the world. So I don’t think there’s anything unusual so far this year, and we’ll continue to keep you posted.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes to us from Nate Svendsen from Deutsche Bank. Please ask your question.

Nate Svendsen, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Hi, guys. Thanks for the question. Couple of earlier questions I wanted to follow-up on. So first on Ramsey’s question on visibility. I think if I heard right in the prepared remarks, you mentioned an improvement in retail being baked into the guide.

So I won’t ask the geopolitical part of the question again. But if I look at transaction growth across each of the regions in digital, growth decelerated pretty much across the board other than APAC. So just wondering, given the volatile macro, what gives you the confidence or visibility into the improvements in retail? Could be comps, other initiatives, but would be great to hear more color. Then maybe how much improvement in retail is actually baked in here?

Matt Cagwin, CFO, Western Union: Hey, Nate. This is Matt. There’s not a massive amount of improvement, but there’s not a deterioration further in in the guide. We do have some glimmers of hope with with certain partners we’re working on right now that we think will give us a little bit of an in the back part of the year, some expansion of non exclusive to exclusive, some potential other partnerships. So it’s a modest amount.

So I don’t think you should worry that if it stayed the way it is today, we fall outside of our guide and have to take it take it down further. But to get to the upper end, we gotta get some improvement.

Nate Svendsen, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Got it. That’s helpful. And then wanted to follow-up on Rayna’s question on the remittance tax. So nice that it came in at 1%, maybe less draconian than earlier versions of the bill and the the detail on less than 20% of overall company revs was helpful. I guess could you walk through some of the mechanics of how you expect that to implement that across your business?

You know, is there any way to size the increased cost with regards to infrastructure to getting that tax remitted or anything KYC or AML related that we should be considering? And then maybe to follow-up on Reina’s question specifically, like what are you doing to try and incentivize the use of non cash remittance methods at the point of sale to maybe get around that tax?

Devin, CEO, Western Union: Yeah, so a couple of things. One, we spent a fair amount of time and energy influencing or trying to influence or hoping we could influence the nature and structure of the legislation that passed a significant improvement from the original version that emerged from the House, both at 5%, but with all kinds of complicated requirements on residency status and things that would be quite difficult to administer. With the rollout of our next generation point of sale platform, WUPAS 2.1, we will be able to easily enable this as it is simply a 1% tax on cash and prepaid card transactions. So that will be quite easy to discern in the system. We will collect the tax at the point of sale and remit to the government.

So the technology investments and the requirements to implement it will be relatively low and we’ll certainly be ready by the time the law is enacted to be able to execute that with high quality and precision. Fortunately for us, the tax itself is an incentive, so I don’t know that we have to do anything other than help people avoid the tax and we should get uptake on the debit card, and we’re hoping enough to spur people to want to open V Go Wallet accounts, which will help us build that product without having to spend an enormous amount on marketing.

Nate Svendsen, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Thanks, Devin. Thanks, Matt.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes to us from Zachary Gunn from Feet Partners. Please ask your question.

Matt Cagwin, CFO, Western Union0: Thanks for taking the question. I appreciate the macro challenges, and I just wanted to follow-up on on that end. So last quarter, there were some fence and orders against specific ZIP codes near the Southwest border. This quarter, we saw additional, fence and orders against a couple of Mexican financial institutions. So is there any way to think about how much of the demand destruction in the corridors is, you know, from the regulatory side and from that supply side of, you know, potential partners that you’re working with or actual consumer demand?

Devin, CEO, Western Union: I think it’s tough to disaggregate. What I can tell you is the partners that were cited publicly were very, very small for us. We did not have much volume, if any, going to those partners. Our partners in Mexico are the large financial institutions, Ban Copal and Elektra and Ban Comer, who are the majority of our transaction volume, both payout to account and payout to cash. So, you know, obviously, anytime there is regulatory action that is going to affect some some some volume and some perception of the market.

My my personal hypothesis is it’s much more overall market demand and changing consumer patterns and behaviors while we get through this particular chapter in the evolution of The US’s immigration policies.

Matt Cagwin, CFO, Western Union0: Got it. Thank you. And just as a quick follow-up with, you know, with the stock where it is, is there any thoughts in terms of capital allocation changing the buyback versus dividend strategy? Thanks.

Devin, CEO, Western Union: There is not.

Conference Operator: Our final question comes to us from Jamie Friedman from Susquehanna. Please ask your question.

Jamie Friedman, Analyst, Susquehanna: Hi. Thank you for taking my question. So I wanted to ask, one about this opportunity three in stablecoin, Devin. I thought this is, potentially quite structurally important. So what you’re saying reduced reliance on the dependency of legacy banking systems, I was hoping you can elaborate on that.

Do you see that more as a cost takeout opportunity, or is that potentially revenue enhancing? And then my last one is you’ve been successful in Europe now for a while with the new strategy. I was wondering at what point you anticipate templatizing your successes there over here. Thank you.

Devin, CEO, Western Union: Great questions. Initially, I think we believe the adoption of a more crypto enabled money movement platform will create efficiency and effectiveness in our core offering. So it will increase speed, reduce friction, and as Matt says, hopefully enable us to better manage the liquidity that we have floating around the system every day. Ultimately, if the value proposition can improve, potentially you can draw market demand and you can increase the overall category and thus revenue. So we see it as an interesting way to evolve how money moves and a potential opportunity to increase the quantity of people who are interested in moving money and therefore grow the top line as well.

But I think that is to be seen. You had a second question.

Jamie Friedman, Analyst, Susquehanna: Yeah. I was just asking the the ability to transfer the successes you’ve had in Europe over here.

Devin, CEO, Western Union: Yes. So we are actively engaged in that project right now. So we’ve asked the current head of our European business to second himself here in The U. S. He just came off of a six week around The U.

S. Tour and has gone back to Spain for a couple of weeks and then will be coming back here later in the summer. So we are actively working to implement the European model and structure both from a go to market standpoint in terms of how we manage the sales force, how we manage the corridors and the tactical pricing, but also just in how do we think about the synergies that come then from operating both of our major regions kind of on the same operating model that allows us to get scale and to get better coordination, particularly in payout markets.

Conference Operator: Thank you for joining today’s second quarter twenty twenty five earnings conference call. We hope you have a great day.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.