Western Union — What I Think
Western Union understood one thing so deeply they’re still alive 175 years later despite getting almost everything else wrong. People don’t send money, they send obligation.
The maid in Dubai wiring home to Kerala, the construction worker in Qatar funding a sister’s wedding — that’s not a financial transaction, it’s love with a receipt. And love does not comparison-shop as ruthlessly as a spreadsheet predicts. That one human truth subsidised one of the most hated fee structures in finance for decades.
The thing they got right, a century before fintech existed: the last mile is the whole business. Anyone can move a number between two cities. The hard part nobody wanted to build is the cash agent in a village with no banking infrastructure, handing physical money to a person with no bank account, no smartphone, sometimes no formal ID. Western Union built that physical mesh across every corridor on earth, in the places banks refused to go because the unit economics looked insane. Half a million agents. That’s the actual product. The wire is just plumbing.
Where they got it wrong, badly: they confused the moat with the price. For years the thesis was “the corridor belongs to us, so the margin belongs to us,” and they read pricing power as permanent. It wasn’t. It was a head start. When smartphones reached the sender and the agent network stopped being the only way to reach the receiver, every assumption flipped. The digital challengers didn’t win by being cheaper. They won by making the village agent optional. Western Union’s strength turned to dead weight the moment the receiver had a phone.
The deeper lesson: an incumbent’s greatest asset is the one it can’t bring itself to cannibalise. The agents were a relationship business, and you can’t disrupt yourself when your own distribution would riot.
Favorite & worst CEO
Multiple CEOs across a long arc. Favourite: Hikmet Ersek. He inherited a cash empire and actually said the quiet part — digital was coming for the core — and pushed toward online and mobile when the legacy org had every incentive to deny it. I connect with the executive who tells his own franchise an uncomfortable truth.
Least connected to: an era more than a person — the long stretch where leadership treated the corridor monopoly as a birthright and let pricing complacency stand in for product vision. Devin McGranahan’s more recent turn toward cost discipline and digital reinvention is the harder, less glamorous work of a company finally racing the clock it ignored too long.
Part of “What I Think About the Top 50 Fintech Companies of All Time.” I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.