State Bank of India (SBI), the largest commercial bank in India has signed an agreement with Western Union, may be the largest money transfer service to India, to offer cross border money transfers service to SBI account holders on their mobile phones. Anil Kapur, Western Union’s Senior VP (South and Southeast Asia), said India is the world’s No. 1 remittance recipient country. According to World Bank figures in 2009 the received figure stood at US$52 billion. At present, consumers through 70,000 Western Union Agent located in 25 countries will be able to send Mobile Money Transfers.
In India, there are 61,000 agent locations of Western Union with the mobile transfer partnership it will be able to expand its distribution within India using SBI’s network. However Western Union is already partnered with SBI, at over 12,000 SBI branches Western Union Money Transfer service is available. With this partnership, SBI customers will be able to transfer money from Western Union into their accounts, using mobile phones, online banking, ATMs and bank branches. In July, Western Union made an announcement in early 2011the Account-Based Money Transfer (ABMT) service will be introduced which will be enable SBI customers with online bank accounts to draw a Western Union Money Transfer directly into their accounts via the Internet or an ATM. According to the release, there are 110 million SBI accountholders, out of which more than 4 million are registered for online banking.
Western Union is offering the Mobile Money Transfer service in many other parts of the world including the Philippines with Smart Communications and Globe Telecom; in Kenya with Safaricom; in Malaysia with Maxis and in South Africa with Absa Bank. Recently company has tied-up with EnStream in Canada and has agreements with Tunisian Post and Bank of Commerce & Development (BoCD) in Libya. Besides this, Western Union had earlier announced tie up with Zain (now owned by Airtel) in Africa.
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