Western Union Wins FinTech Breakthrough Award for “Consumer Payments Innovation”
16.3.2021 15:05:00 EET | Business Wire | Press release
The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU), a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments, today was named winner of the “Consumer Payments Innovation Award” in the fifth annual FinTech Breakthrough Awards for 2021. The company’s innovative cross-border money transfer solution was awarded for its ‘plug and play’ technology used by a growing number of financial institutions to offer seamless, convenient, reliable, and fast international money transfer capabilities for their customers, connecting them to more than 200 countries and territories and over 130 currencies.
Western Union’s White Label Digital Partner technology solution enables FIs to use their existing branded customer technological interface to provide international money transfer services. FI’s customers can fund the transfers drawing from their linked bank accounts, wallets, or cards and choose to pay their receivers through the world’s widest-reaching networks, operated by Western Union, accessing billions of bank accounts, millions of digital wallets, and cards, and over half a million retail locations.
The FinTech Breakthrough Awards is the premier awards program founded to recognize the FinTech innovators, leaders, and visionaries worldwide in various categories, including Digital Banking, Personal Finance, Lending, Payments, Investments, RegTech, InsurTech, and many more. The 2021 FinTech Breakthrough Award program attracted more than 3,850 nominations from across the world.
“Western Union continues to deliver stellar customer experiences for consumers and businesses, moving money around the world every day, simplifying international money transfer complexities, including compliance, regulatory control, and settlement in over 130 currencies. Western Union has taken decades of innovation in serving its own branded customers and is now offering this functionality in a breakthrough white-label arrangement, driving even more cross-border connections for the wider financial sector,” said James Johnson, Managing Director, FinTech Breakthrough.
FinTech Breakthrough Awards perform the most in-depth evaluation of the sector to recognize the creativity, hard work, and success of innovative FinTech companies, technologies, and products worldwide.
“We are thrilled with the 2021 FinTech Breakthrough Award win and are honored with the recognition for our innovative cross-border money movement ‘plug and play’ capability, offered white label or branded as a part of our Digital Partner technology solution,” said Western Union President of Global Network, Jean Claude Farah.
Farah continued, “FI customers can initiate transactions from their bank website or mobile app and send directly to beneficiaries’ bank accounts, mobile wallets, cards, or for in-person cash pickup throughout Western Union’s leading global financial network bridging more than 200 countries and territories and over 130 currencies. With our Western Union Digital Partner technology solution, FIs can count on us to handle the cross-border payout of transactions seamlessly, in minutes, at scale, and in compliance with national and international regulations.”
The opening of Western Union’s cross-border platform and global financial network to third parties marks a strategic step to evolve Western Union to a diversified payments company, accessing adjacent cross-border money movement segments, and adding incremental customers.
FIs and the customers they serve no longer need to be confined to expensive, unpredictable, traditional cross-border payment channels. Western Union’s solution keeps the customer experience firmly in the hands of the FI - from the user interface to branding to pricing - while Western Union takes care of the complexities of the cross-border payout to the beneficiary. Additionally, Western Union’s robust compliance and risk ecosystem supports partners with sanctions and interdiction screening, and real-time risk assessment to detect and prevent fraud while also meeting local regulatory requirements for payouts.
About Western Union
The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU) is a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments. Western Union’s platform provides seamless cross-border flows, and its leading global financial network bridges more than 200 countries and territories and over 130 currencies. We connect businesses, financial institutions, governments, and consumers through one of the world’s widest-reaching networks, accessing billions of bank accounts, millions of digital wallets and cards, and over half a million retail locations. Western Union connects the world to bring boundless possibilities within reach. For more information, visit www.westernunion.com.
About FinTech Breakthrough
Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for technology innovation and leadership around the globe, the FinTech Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in Financial Technologies and Services companies and products. The FinTech Breakthrough Awards provide public recognition for the achievements of FinTech companies and products in categories including Payments, Personal Finance, Wealth Management, Fraud Protection, Banking, Lending, RegTech, InsurTech, and more. For more information, visit FinTechBreakthrough.com.
WU-G
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210316005405/en/
Contact information
Media Contact
Rachel Rogala, Western Union
Rachel.rogala@wu.com
+1 303-808-2674
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
Nexthop AI Unveils Transformative, industry-leading Scale-out and Scale-across Switches engineered for Hyperscalers & NeoClouds10.3.2026 14:45:00 EET | Press release
Nexthop AI, the leading pioneer of highly efficient AI Networking, today launched a range of products for scale-out, scale-across and front-end applications for cloud and AI datacenters. The launch portfolio sets new standards for performance, power efficiency, and deployment speed - very critical metrics in AI infrastructure. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260310990709/en/ Nexthop AI's highly efficient scale-out and scale-across AI networking portfolio Nexthop also unveiled the Disaggregated Spine architecture - a new, highly efficient, scale-across network design developed in collaboration with a large hyperscaler. This innovative architecture decomposes the traditional monolithic chassis running proprietary software into independent, optimized, functional tiers. It features a scale-across leaf tier (data center fabric facing) and scale-across spine tier (data center interconnect facing) offering deep buffe
Nexthop AI Accelerates Into Hypergrowth With Oversubscribed $500M Series B Funding, Catapulting the Company’s Valuation to $4.2 Billion10.3.2026 14:45:00 EET | Press release
Nexthop AI, the leading pioneer of highly efficient AI Networking, today announced successful closure of an oversubscribed $500 Million Series B funding round, catapulting the company’s valuation to $4.2 Billion. This round was spearheaded by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Andreessen Horowitz joining as a major investor, and participation from Altimeter and all existing investors. “The rapid growth of AI is forcing a fundamental rethink of data center network architecture — and that creates one of the largest infrastructure market opportunities we’ve seen in a generation, with the potential to build a $100B+ company. That conviction led us to invest in Nexthop AI from Day One,” said Guru Chahal, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “Nexthop is uniquely positioned to become the next great networking vendor by combining hyperscale-grade performance, open software, and a co-development model built in lockstep with the world’s largest AI operators.“ “AI clusters are pushing data cent
Corpay Cross-Border Named Official Foreign Exchange Provider of the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship10.3.2026 14:30:00 EET | Press release
Corpay, Inc.*, (NYSE: CPAY) a global leader in corporate payments, today announced that its Cross-Border business has partnered with Formula E, the world’s first all-electric FIA World Championship and B Corp Certified sport. Under the agreement, Corpay becomes the exclusive and Official Foreign Exchange Provider of the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260310640540/en/ The ABB FIA Formula E World Championship brings dramatic racing to the heart of some of the world’s most iconic cities providing an elite motorsport platform for the world’s leading automotive manufacturers to accelerate electric vehicle innovation with the GEN3 Evo race continuing to set a new benchmark as the fastest-accelerating FIA single-seater, rocketing from 0-60 mph in an astonishing 1.82 seconds. Through this partnership, Corpay Cross-Border will provide comprehensive FX risk management and internati
Armis Announces Armis Centrix™ for Vulnerability Management Detection and Response to Reduce Cyber Risk and Eliminate Operational Friction10.3.2026 14:00:00 EET | Press release
Armis, the cyber exposure management & security company, today announced Armis Centrix™ for Vulnerability Management Detection and Response. The solution enables security teams to precisely identify and validate vulnerabilities across all of an organization’s assets in real time. Armis’ unified approach to vulnerability assessment results in greater accuracy, faster detection time and reduced operational costs. "Waiting weeks for a vulnerability scan that still misses essential assets is no longer sufficient to combat AI-powered cyberattacks,” said Nadir Izrael, CTO and Co-Founder at Armis. “Organizations need a continuous view of their complete environment to stay ahead of threats. Armis' new solution delivers more accurate, targeted results than traditional vulnerability management solutions with a fraction of the scans. It empowers security teams to shift from a reactive approach that relies on stale data to targeted, real-time vulnerability detection, allowing them to save time, en
Wolters Kluwer Releases 2026 Future Ready Lawyer Survey Report, Highlighting Rapid AI Gains and Shifting Power Dynamics10.3.2026 14:00:00 EET | Press release
Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory has published the results of its global 2026 Future Ready Lawyer Survey, the preeminent source of insights from lawyers in law firms and corporate legal departments across the U.S., China and nine European countries. The findings show an industry coming to grips with the accelerated adoption of AI technology, an ambitious undertaking that has yielded long sought-after efficiencies across workflows and business practices, while raising unexpected challenges to ethics and infrastructure. “The Future Ready Lawyer global report has always reflected an industry in motion,” said Martin O'Malley, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory. “What’s most striking this year is how rapidly legal professionals are accelerating to meet that change by reshaping business models, rethinking long‑held dynamics, and embracing new ways to deliver value through both evolving skills and bold technology.” AI Delivers, Challenges Persist A substantial majority of respondents (
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom