Tag Archives: Western Union

Somaliland Turns 20 Today–Legal Next Year?

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More and more, Somaliland is being “discovered” in the media, and is attracting more interest and attention from international investors and businesses, and international organizations. As progress has been made in the south militarily against Al-Shabaab, but the TFG continues to face extensive institutional uncertainty, the time is surely approaching for other nations to start moving toward formalizing Somaliland’s status.

Good coverage this week in three stories and a multimedia presentation in the Financial Times.

Western Union adds Somaliland service, reports the UNPO:

The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU), a leader in global payment services, has extended its rapidly growing agent network to Somaliland, taking the total number of African markets it serves up to fifty.

The strategic agreement between Western Union and Global Exchange and Money Transfer, a subsidiary of Global Export and Import Agency Ltd, will see it offer the Western Union® Money TransferSM service for the first time in the area, initially at a location in Hargesia with additional locations to be rolled out across Somaliland in the course of 2011.

This follows a string of recent agent network expansions by Western Union, which last year celebrated 15 years in Africa and has grown its agent network on the continent to reach more than 22,000 Agent locations.

Somaliland has been receiving an estimated $1B per year in transfers from it’s diaspora, but inclusion in the Western Union network should make a variety of inflows easier and more “regular” for institutions.

Until we get M-PESA in the United States . . .

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Western Union formally announced today its link-up with M-PESA to allow those of us in less developed countries, from an ICT standpoint, to make money transfers to M-PESA accounts.    From the Denver Business Journal:

People in Kenya have a new high-tech way to receive money, thanks to Englewood-based Western Union (NYSE: WU).

The money transfer giant on Thursday announced that consumers now can send money directly to mobile “wallets” in Kenya from 45 countries and territories — the first service of its kind in the world, the company said.

The service will use Western Union’s worldwide network for processing cross-border remittances, as well as M-PESA, a domestic mobile money-transfer service in Kenya that has attracted more than 13.5 million customers since its launch in 2007.

“This service between Western Union and M-PESA shows a huge advancement for money transfer,” said Rebecca Loevenguth, director of strategic alliances for Western Union. “We recognized high mobile penetration in these markets, and a low number of people who used banks. We are adapting to meet customers’ needs through a new channel.”

.  .  .  .

“We’ve been able to reach consumers who lived near our agent locations, but we may have been missing a huge segment that had an M-PESA account but weren’t using Western Union,” she said.

Kenyans use so-called mobile wallets, or money-transfer services, for cellphones, to shop, pay bills, save money and make person-to-person payments, Loevenguth said.

The consumer sends a payment request via an SMS text message and a charge is applied to their online wallet.

The Central Bank of Kenya reports that Kenyans living outside their home country sent $642 million home in 2010 — up from the $609 million in 2009.

I wonder how the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission is coming toward recovery of the share of Safaricom that was diverted to Mobiltelea Ventures Limited?