International money transfer services provider Western Union (WU) has launched a campaign against wire transfer transactions involving digital currency exchanges. The company’s decision to disallow cryptocurrency-related services or transactions is covered by its internal regulations.
In a post by a Reddit user in early December 2017, the company has reportedly advised the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken that it is not processing a transaction related to digital currencies because it is against its internal rules.
This decision by WU is expected to adversely affect the operation of virtual currency exchanges, as well as the consumers using cryptocurrencies. This will also affect the profitability of the company as it will lose out a lot of business in the long term, considering the growing popularity of the cryptocurrencies all over the world.
The financial services and communications company is based in Colorado. The firm was established in 1851 and is currently headed by its Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Hikmet Ersek.
The company offers various services including remittance, wire transfers and business payments. Along with banks, it has recently been receiving competition from peer-to-peer payment companies and ease in cross-border transactions through Blockchain.
A trend against cryptocurrencies?
The move by WU to ban transactions involving cryptocurrencies is similar to the actions taken by different financial providers around the world which prevented their customers from buying and selling digital currencies. Several banks have also gone a bit further by closing accounts involved in the trading of virtual currencies.
This trend of prohibiting transactions involving digital currencies is very unfortunate as the virtual tokens continue their growth and slowly but surely gaining approval from the general public. Although this is a bad precedent to the virtual currency market, it is expected that this ongoing trend will have little impact on the continuous growth of the leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin, as well as the lesser-known virtual currencies.