Western Union Extends Education Payment Services In Japan

The Western Union Company (NYSE:WU) announced that its unit, Western Union Business Solutions, has tied up with Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (“APU”). The latter, being a diverse and multicultural university in Japan, is home to around 3,000 international students from more than 90 countries.

The collaboration will make use of a simple payment process and enable students to make hassle-free payment of enrollment fees, thereby ensuring the timely arrival of funds. Such payments, exclusive of any embedded charges, will be made using the company’s international payment platform, namely GlobalPay for Students. The platform was initiated in 2017 in Japan.

Apart from making payments either in the local or preferred currency, the platform helps students to keep track of their payment status via online portal, mobile messages and email. Also, it will relieve the burden of financial and administration resources in educational institutions by easing the payment process.

The action is in line with the company’s efforts to expand in high-growth areas, such as education payments, thereby leveraging its EDGE platform and digital self-service offerings. Notably, Western Union made transactions worth $1.4 billion with academic institutions. Also, the company collaborated with Temple University Japan Campus last year to enable students to pay tuition fees in a simplified process.

Western Union reports revenues under three segments — Consumer–to–Consumer, Business Solutions and Other. The tie-up is expected to benefit the company’s Business Solutions segment, which accounted for 7% of total revenues in 2019. After suffering soft revenues for quite some time, the segment is now recovering. The company achieved constant currency revenue growth for the sixth straight quarter in the segment. We believe such actions are likely to benefit the segment going forward.

Shares of the Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company have gained 35.2% in a year, outperforming its industry's rise of 34.4%.

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All three stocks surpassed estimates in the last reported quarters by 20.69%, 1.47% and 4.17%, on average, respectively.

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