Western Union eyes growing remittance market in India

Eyeing the growing remittance market in India, Western Union, a global money-transfer service provider is projecting itself as a safe and reliable medium to transfer money to India.

According to Suvodeep Das, South Asia marketing director, “India has the world’s second largest migrant population, of about 25 million, who stay in different countries across the world. Every year over 7,500,000 migrants get added to this list”.

The number is significant and is next only to China which has 30 million migrant people living across the globe.

Western Union with over 40,000 agent locations in 4,000 towns, cities and villages helps the migrant Indian population (most of whom are from Punjab, Gujarat and Kerala) in sending and receiving money.

Giving example of about one lakh Punjabi farmers engaged in farming in Italy, Das said, “Most of the Indian migrants are blue-collared workers and we help them send money to their loved ones living in India”.
Since a large portion of the remittance market in India is informal, the size of this market becomes difficult to estimate or quantify.

“We are trying to capture this informal market most of which exists in rural India”, he added.

Explaining the safety and reliability of the transactions Das said, “we have a paper trial of all transactions so we can identify both sender and receiver”.

Western Union has registered a growth of 95 pct in the last six quarters in India and agent locations has grown from 3000 in 2001 to 40,000.