Here is more background about the nature of the pivots at WU. WU had already pivoted once in the 1970s to become a satellite communication company being one of

Here is more background about the nature of the pivots at WU. WU had already pivoted once in the 1970s to become a satellite communication company being one of the first companies to have five birds in orbit. (Westar series) Sometime around 1980(?) things were so bad they went into chapter 11, bankruptcy protection. At a senior executive meeting the reports were all bad. A guy named Art Tarini spoke up and said "What about money transfer? Can't we do something with that?" The reply was something like "Art if you think you can help give it a try" Art setup a call centre and had a small sales force to sign up agents in small stores in the north east side of the USA as money transfer locations and created paper forms to record the transaction details. All agent transactions were sent over the telephone. They were scheduled to be in bankruptcy court at the end of the year, but the new money transfer business was making so much money they cancelled it. Told to me by Art Tarini in 2001. (Paraphrased from memory) Later on (1990?) a computer terminal was created with Turbo C, communicating over modems to a back office system. In 1989 when US law changed to allowed transfers to other countries somebody asked "I wonder if Mexicans in the USA would want to send money home?" A new platform was created to handle foreign exchange and the rest is history. Telegraph service was shutdown in 2006. It was still doing ~$10M per year in revenue then. Money transfers were about $4B.