Secure international and domestic transfers with Western Union

Western Union has been operating globally for nearly 30 years. They provide incredibly convenient service for people living in more than 160 countries. Actually, the area of Western Union coverage has been growing over entire time it exists.

Let's talk about the advantages of Western Union and find out why people use it so often.

Advantages of Western Union

The first advantage was already mentioned — Western Union works with nearly all countries in the world. The service has established partnership with dozens (sometimes hundreds) of international and regional banks. It means that you can easily send money to any place and rest assured that the recipient will get it nearly instantly.

Speaking about Euro transfers with Western Union we'd like to emphasize that the service covers entire European Union. Actually, the geography of Euro transfers is absolutely the same to the coverage of transfers in USD and other currencies.

Another great thing is that Western Union is also a convenient tool for internal (domestic) money transfers. The fees are much lower then.

Neither sender nor recipient needs to have a bank account for using Western Union. The thing is that you send money to a particular person who has to confirm his or her identity when receiving the transfer. Undoubtedly this advantage of Western Union played crucial role on the early stage of company's development. No bureaucracy — isn't that fabulous?

Western Union terms and conditions are absolutely transparent. They are available on the website of the service. In addition we suggest you checking their loyalty program. Regular senders can benefit from it a lot paying smaller fees and getting other bonuses.

Disadvantages of Western Union

High fees are the main thing Western Union is criticized for. The commission for international transfers may reach up to 25%! Please be attentive with it. The commissions totally depend on the country of origin and target country. They are so different that we are not even trying to publish them here. It's much better to visit Western Union website, go to Rates section and check the needed directions.

As for Euro transfers there is another problems — the transfer can be received in Euro only in case if Euro is the official currency of the target country. Therefore if you send a Euro transfer to, let's say, Russia, your recipient will then receive the funds in Russian rubles or US dollars. All transfers can be received in either local currency or USD.

Currency exchange rate in Western Union is far from good — typically it's 3-7% worse than in a bank. But people who say that Western Union is a fraud are deeply mistaken! The service does not try to hide the information about fees or currency exchange rates. Such data is available on the website. When making an online transfer you will be able to see how much you send, what the fee and currency exchange rate are and how much money the recipient is going to get.

Fees for domestic transactions are somewhere between 5% and 15% depending on the country. Such dispersion is easily explained — Western Union has different terms of partnership with local banks. The service also has to follow local legislation and pay local taxes. These factors have the main impact on the commissions.

The last disadvantage we'd like to mention here is tightly connected to the advantage specified earlier — a wide network of local partners. Every partner treats customers in a different way. Sometimes employees of a local bank can be inattentive and commit a mistake in sender's or recipient's personal information. Such things make transfers get frozen or rejected. They are just annoying. Please control the entire process of entering your information when sending money via a local partner of Western Union.

Buy or sell Western Union Euro for digital currencies

Makoli.com is a Ukrainian exchange service where traders can sell or buy Bitcoin for Western Union Euro. You can exchange from 50 to 3000 EUR at once. The exchange fee of 0.001 BTC is the standard one.

Another exchange service allowing for exchanging Western Union Euro to BTC is Lionex.net. They do not state the commission, but the exchange rate provided is certainly worse than on Makoli.com. Anyway, Lionex.net has positive feedback from customers and can be considered as a credible service for buying or selling BTC for Western Union Euro.

That's quite a challenging thing to find an exchange service where you can directly buy other digital currencies for Western Union Euro or sell them. Usually Litecoin, Namecoin and other cryptocurrencies are firstly exchanged for BTC or other more common currency (Payeer EUR, for instance), and only after this you can exchange them for Western Union Euro.

Don't forget to gather as much information about an exchange service as possible — there are many fly-by-night services cheating and stealing money. Be careful! Don't rush to sell your Western Union Euros to a new place with tremendous exchange rate!

Conclusion

You would hardly find a better way to transfer your money to a very remote country than Western Union. And even high fees and incompetence of local representatives will not stop you from that as Western Union means that the successful transaction is guaranteed.

But as for sending money within the same country — well, Western Union is definitely not the right option, we suppose. There are lots of local, flexible and more affordable online payment systems in nearly every country nowadays. These are much more reasonable options for domestic transfers.

The same concerns Western Union Euro transfers. European Union is like a large country without any economic borders. There are plenty of other online payment solutions in the Euro zone with smaller commissions and same time of transaction processing.

Finally, it makes no sense to send Euro via Western Union to non-Euro countries — the recipient will be able to get either local currency or US dollar. Include here pretty inconvenient exchange rate and draw the right conclusion.

This article is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, endorsed or otherwise approved by Western Union.