Western Union, will invest $100 million in its India technology centre, its president and CEO Hikmet Ersek said. The Western Union Technology Engineering Centre (WUTEC) at Pune in India will have a team strength of 1,000. Western Union entered India through the acquisition of Pune-based Opus Software Solutions in 2017 and is now expanding its footprint. The details of this deal were not disclosed. Opus Software is a technology firm specialising in software products and integration services in the payments domain. Around 300 people from Opus are part of WUTEC. Western Union has three such global technology centres in US; this is the fourth centre. The India operations will account for 30% of the Western Union engineering strength, he said. This will be the company’s innovation and engineering hub and this investment in India is part of a broader fintech and innovation strategy that is driving the company’s digital transformation.
Western Union still has a dominant role in the money transfer business despite the entry of digital payment start-ups, telecom firms and banks getting into this space, as the company offers cross-border cross-currency money transfers that nobody has been able to get into successfully, Ersek said.
