WESTERN UNION (COMMERCIAL POSTAGE STAMP)

Motif: Western Union Money Transfer The stamp has been issued in a ten-stamp sheetlet with ten labels, and there is also a First Day Cover (FDC). For more than 150 years, Western Union have stood as a trusted symbol for connecting friends, families and businesses around the world. With its headquarters in the United States of America, Western Union Financial Services Inc. is the leading company that offers services of money transfer. The goal of Western Union is to make possible swift, simple and reliable money transfers to millions of people, daily, from one end of the world to the other. In the United States of America the service of money transfer was introduced in the year 1871. Since then the offer of this type of service keeps continuously increasing. Nowadays Western Union is one of the biggest companies in the money transfer industry. The Western Union Company with its affiliates Orlandi Valuta, Vigo and Pago Fácil are leaders in the global money transfer; they provide their consumers with fast, reliable and convenient ways of transferring money around the world, the possibility of paying bills or ordering money, using a wide network of approximately 320,000 agent locations in more than 200 countries and territories. Western Union mainly acts around the world, supported by a network of agents like banks, postal offices or retail shops. Almost 70 percent of agents of Western Union outside the USA are banks or postal offices that have an independent licence and whose activity is subject to their own jurisdiction. According to the Aita Group report for the year 2005, the trading volume of the world money order market came up to 269 billion $, at which the Western Union market share was assessed at 17.4 percent. Around the world, Western Union handles more than 396 million money transfers a year. On September 29, 2006, Western Union was quoted for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) as an independent company. With their 6,000 employees and more than four billion $ income, Western Union continues running business on the global money order market, spreading out their agent network. Western Union also continues to work on the capitalization of long-term global migration trends and the increase of international money orders. The appearance on the New York Stock Exchange made it possible for Western Union to focus on their fundamental business, the further strengthening of their marketing brand and the spreading and deepening of their relations with clients and agents as well as the reinvestment of stock into business growth. Western Union® Money Transfer is the service of electronic money transfer that in a reliable and convenient way transfers money around the world in a few minutes (the payment of the carried out transaction depends on the working hours of the agency and the time zones). The users of the Western Union services are of different kinds: migrants who send part of their earning to their loved ones, parents whose children study abroad, experts and professionals on their business travels or tourists. The fundamental user group are emigrants in the developed countries who send their earning to their native country. By the money transfer in this simple way they offer financial help and support to their families. As a financial mediator among people, Western Union helps them to preserve connections and maintain contacts.