Western Union ($WU) podcast mentions
Right. And Western Union takes a big chunk out of that.
Adam Taggart · Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart · Risk Of A 10% Market Correction Now Uncomfortably High | Lance Roberts · 2026-08-22I'll take, uh, Remitly and Wise. Those are very, very different businesses, but functionally they do a lot of the same thing, which is helping move money across borders. Like, Remitly is a purely um, a migrant remittance provider. So their whole— it's really, uh, um, a Western Union killer is what you get, how you can think about what, uh, Remitly— like a digital, digitally native, uh, player, uh, you know, much more enhanced experience, cheaper, cheaper fees, and is really just kind of really eroded Western Union's business model. And they really have built my mindshare with migrants. So migrants, um, You know, they're not like your typical customer. They really understand that market well. They're not just going to try to find the low-cost solution. Trust is a huge deal for them. Branding is a huge deal for them. So having that mindshare in the migrant community is a— is, is going to help defend their take rate. Their take rate is going to naturally come down. It's going to come down very, very slowly, like, and you see that, like, you know, a dip here, a dip there, uh, but, you know, their send volumes growing, you know, 30 40% annually. Um, so, you know, send volumes growing 30-40% annually and revenues growing 25%. So that's really kind of the structure. And if you look at the durability of that growth, uh, you could see that out, you know, next 5 or 10 years. You know, the more and more money that goes through kind of these fintechs as opposed to correspondent banking. Not to mention there's still a lot of money that, you know, just moves from cash. People, there's, you know, there's still significant room for digitization as people go from moving, you know, people walk into your Western Union, uh, uh, with, you know, a bunch of money to kind of send to their kind of grandma in Mexico or something. That, that, that kind of electrification or electronification of cash is still happening. So you have several trends that are, uh, kind of working in the same direction.
Daya Purnas · Monetary Matters with Jack Farley · Misunderstood Stocks in Data Center Power, Cybersecurity, and Payments | Dean & Deiya Pernas · 2026-08-07Hello, Invest Talk. My name is, uh, Brian. I'm calling from Ohio. I was wondering if you could go over the stock Western Union. Wu, I always like to listen to the program. Thanks.
Steve Peasley · InvestTalk · Can the Magnificent Seven Earnings Hold the Market Up? · 2026-07-22Western Union is a global money transfer giant. They've been around for really quite some time at this point doing their thing. They first IPO'd back in, uh, let's see, 2006, but they've certainly been around a bit longer than that. And looking at the past 6 years of performance, it is not great. They have been negative every year. Um, their relative return at some points has been as high as 45 in terms of underperforming the index, sometimes as high as 50 and underperforming their industry. Their revenue is falling on an annualized basis going back the past 5 years. It's projected to grow a little bit this year from $4 billion to $4.18 billion, and that's the first time they've seen growth at least in the past 6 years. Net income is down 48% year over year in Q1. Revenue was flat year over year on a GAAP basis. I'm not really seeing much that I like here. Q1 EPS miss by, you know, differences in vendor incentives. They have FX losses that are mounting. It is a company that tends to benefit from seasonal travel money transfers, and that's been weak. I think the only positive I'm seeing is that they affirmed guidance in their most recent earnings, which was in mid-April. But I, you know, I'm not really seeing much I like. I can guess you're interested in it because the dividend is 11% right now. Um, this is another example of not choosing to invest in a company because of its dividend, because it's been at least 6.8% going back to 2022, but on a real return basis, that's not great if you're losing 20, 30% a year. So I mean, it's, it's melting ice cube in a lot of ways. There isn't really any clear path towards strong performance. I mean, there is an acquisition that's closing in Q2 that might help them out with Intermex, but I'm not seeing anything structural that is likely to push this thing in a direction that makes me want to invest in it, even though it's now trading nearly as low as it has over the past 5 years. So Western Union, hard pass. Thanks for the call. What a great show for you yesterday.
Luke Guerrero · InvestTalk · Can the Magnificent Seven Earnings Hold the Market Up? · 2026-07-22Yeah, I think so too. Thank you, Jack. I tell you one thing that Jack said that I think is really important, and I want to give you a little historic tidbit here. Jack started with SWAT teams everywhere. SWAT teams everywhere. This is what we should be praying for. In, um, number one, um, that hearts will heal on all sides. Hearts will heal. Um, that the truth comes out, that the guilty go to jail and the innocent are proven to be, you know, innocent. Um, but the other thing we have to pray for is that this doesn't happen. This is, um, this is Jack Ruby. This is November 24th, 1963. This is in the basement of the courthouse, in the Texas courthouse in Dallas, Texas. Um, Lee Harvey Oswald is caught. He's caught with a gun. They know that he's the guy who did it. He is now walking to be transferred, and he's in the basement in the parking lot. And the guy who comes up to him is Jack Ruby. And Jack Ruby has a gun, and he comes right up to him and shoots him. This is really one of the reasons the conspiracy theories are so strong, because of this moment. Now I want to show you something. This is how weird my family is. This is what my wife gave to me for Father's Day. This is a telegram. It was sent 34 minutes after, uh, Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald, okay? And it's sent from just a woman in, um, uh, in Chicago. Mrs. Gage. Mrs. G.F. Gage. Okay, and she sends it to one— the Western Union telegram to Jack Ruby, Dallas, Texas courthouse basement, Dallas. She writes, congratulations, you had the courage to do what the rest of the world would like to have done. This moment may have felt good for some people. This moment is what sealed the fate of the never-ending conspiracy theories. And we still don't really know what's true. And if Jack Ruby wouldn't have shot him, maybe we would have. Maybe we would have. That's why the SWAT team is there, and that's why the SWAT team needs to be there. And we need to pray for safety for everyone involved.
Glenn Beck · The Glenn Beck Program · Mamdani’s Nefarious Strategy to Undermine the Republic | Guest: Jack Posobiec | 7/10/26 · 2026-07-10Switching costs can cut both ways because if you have high customer switching costs, then probably your competitors do too. It's hard to get people to switch. You have trouble growing in the high switching cost industries a lot of times. Network effects are often held up as the end-all be-all of moats, but network effects can degrade. People leave the network, the value of the community diminishes. The distinction between radial networks like Western Union or nodal networks, It's complicated. And that's honestly one of the fun things about it is that over time you start to, like everything in investing, develop pattern recognition. The great traders that you read about in Money Masters, they develop pattern recognition. I've seen this macro story before and here's how it usually plays out. So I'm going to make this bet. Analyzing competitive advantage is the same thing. The more companies you look at, the more likely you are to say, okay, I think there's something here. And then you try to think through why. Is it a government approval? Is it a switching cost? Is it scale economies? There's some foundational attribute enables the company to withstand competition, defy the laws of economic gravity, sustain high returns on capital in a competitive world where both in theory and empirically, most companies don't do that. Most companies do revert over time to cost of capital.
Pat Dorsey · Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry · Moat Investing Nuances – Pat Dorsey · 2026-07-06It's going to depend on the business. Switching costs can cut both ways because if you have high customer switching costs, then probably your competitors do too. It's hard to get people to switch. You have trouble growing in the high switching cost industries a lot of times. Network effects are often held up as the end-all be-all of moats, but network effects can degrade. People leave the network, the value of the community diminishes. The distinction between radial networks like Western Union or nodal networks It's complicated. And that's honestly one of the fun things about it is that over time you start to, like everything in investing, develop pattern recognition. The great traders that you read about in Money Masters, they develop pattern recognition. I've seen this macro story before and here's how it usually plays out. So I'm going to make this bet. Analyzing competitive advantage is the same thing. The more companies you look at, the more likely you are to say, okay, I think there's something here. Then you try to think through why. Is it a government approval? Is it a switching cost? Is it scale economies? There's some foundational attribute that enables the company to withstand competition, defy the laws of economic gravity, sustain high returns on capital in a competitive world where both in theory and empirically, most companies don't do that. Most companies do revert over time to cost of capital.
Pat Dorsey · Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry · Moat Investing Nuances – Pat Dorsey · 2026-07-06It was very slow and very frustrating. Very slow and frustrating. So one thing I would say about. I think this case is a very good example of the evolution of the FBI in many ways as well. So in the beginning in 2007, that was a time when we and the FBI, we didn't necessarily work hand in hand with private sector. Right. So even though I ended up talking with Liam in 2007, we shared some information a little bit, but then we kind of went our separate ways. We didn't Talk again until 2012, because that was kind of the way that we did things at that time in the FBI. We didn't share information too much with the private sector. We would, you know, do subpoenas, we would do search warrants, and we would gather information, but we didn't necessarily work hand in hand like we do today. Also, at that time, we didn't necessarily work very many investigations that touched overseas either. So, again, I was a new agent in the FBI, and I opened this investigation and pretty quickly was able to determine that all the money was going overseas. I was tracking the money, was figuring out where it was getting picked up in different countries in Europe. And when I figured that out and I was talking with the other agents on my squad, their reaction was basically, oh, you need to close that case. Again, this is in 2007, and we just didn't have as much visibility and as much partnership with other countries as we do today. And so I refused to close the case and kept working it and kept collecting information, even though I was very limited in what I could do. I was talking with the. I mean, we did have an FBI office in Bucharest in Romania. And so I was sending information to our FBI office over there to try to. Initially, I was simply sending them information on the money mules that were picking up the money. So I was able to track the money being sent via Western Union. And initially it was getting picked up in Greece, and then it was in Hungary, and then it was Romania. It was several different countries in Europe where money was getting picked up. So I didn't necessarily know at first that it was Romania. But most of the money mules were using Romanian IDs when they would pick up the money. So for five years, all I'm really able to collect for the most part is victory victim information. Right. I'm. I'm creating the spreadsheet of all these different victims that I've identified. I'm identifying money mule accounts or IDs and money transactions, and I'm collecting all of that information now.
Stacy Whitaker · Darknet Diaries · Bayrob · 2026-06-02Remittances do get in. What's interesting is sort of that the way remittances are getting in has changed somewhat. It used to be that, you know, you went to Western Union in Miami, which had a license to operate in Cuba, you sent money. They were able to take money out in a Cuban equivalent currency and go to a store run by essentially the Cuban mill military and buy imported goods. What's happened now is that the Cuban military and the Cuban financial system has been cut out of that flow to some degree. And so now there's this whole kind of private sector channel whereby businesses that have a foot on the ground in Cuba, but also say a bank account in a place like Canada or Mexico, they have a website, you can go online, it's almost like Amazon. You can order your family stuff and within three to four days it's delivered to their door. But the money is going to an account outside of Cuba that's then used to pay for it exports from somewhere to Cuba. And so the economic impact for the Cuban economy as a whole is not great, but it's a real lifeline for many, many people to get by.
Michael Bustamante · GZERO World with Ian Bremmer · Cuba's Trump standoff and economic crisis with Michael Bustamante · 2026-04-25