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Western Union selects Screenverse as exclusive programmatic technology partner for its DOOH network. October 13, 2026 The partnership gives advertisers access to more than 2,600 digital screens across 124 U.S. markets, reaching consumers during everyday financial transactions and money management moments. NEW YORK, NY - October 13, 2026 - Screenverse, a leading programmatic technology partner for digital out-of-home (DOOH), announced a new partnership today with Western Union, a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement, payments, and digital financial services. The partnership gives advertisers the opportunity to connect with consumers as they manage money, make payments, and navigate everyday financial decisions. Western Union's DOOH media network spans more than 2,600 digital screens across 124 U.S. markets and generates more than 623 million monthly impressions. With a strong presence in major markets including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston, advertisers can reach consumers at national scale while focusing on the markets and communities most relevant to their campaigns. What sets Western Union apart is the financial mindset of consumers visiting these locations. Screens are positioned across financial services and everyday retail environments, including check-cashing centers, banks, supermarkets, pharmacies, and convenience stores. In this context, consumers are focused on accessing funds, managing finances, and making payments. With average dwell times of 15-20 minutes, brands also benefit from extended exposure as consumers spend time completing transactions. "Western Union brings something the DOOH ecosystem hasn't had at scale by creating a national financial services footprint that reaches consumers in the middle of real transaction moments," said Nick Sadler, Senior Vice President of Supply at Screenverse. "Financial services has been an underbuilt venue category, and this partnership opens it up with the reach and targeting rigor programmatic buyers expect. For advertisers, it's a rare combination of high-attention environments, a captive audience, and inventory that clears through the pipes they're already buying." Western Union provides audience insights highlighting strong representation across Hispanic, African American, Asian, and immigrant communities, creating opportunities for brands to reach diverse multicultural audiences. Its financial services footprint can also help advertisers reach consumers who primarily use cash or checks and may be less visible through traditional digital targeting methods. "Our partnership with Screenverse marks an important step in expanding the reach and sophistication of the Western Union Media Network," said Josh Bernstein, Director of Media Network Operations at Western Union. "Screenverse brings an unbiased, independent perspective that opens doors to new buyers and fresh demand. We're thrilled to work with a partner whose goals are fully aligned with helping us grow." The partnership helps advertisers reach consumers at key financial moments that other media channels can't replicate. Western Union's DOOH inventory is available programmatically through Screenverse via Place Exchange by Broadsign and Perion, giving advertisers flexible ways to plan and activate campaigns across the network. About Screenverse Screenverse is the leading partner for DOOH media owners, specializing in monetization and ad management solutions that scale programmatic revenue. Established in 2020, Screenverse has built the largest network of DOOH inventory in the physical world, with over 150,000+ digital screens across 29 networks, including billboards, urban panels, retail, and residential environments. Connecting advertisers to premium media nationwide through both programmatic and direct channels, Screenverse delivers meaningful results for brands, agencies, and media owners alike. For more information, please visit screenversemedia.com About Western Union The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU) is committed to helping people around the world who aspire to build financial futures for themselves, their loved ones and their communities. Its leading cross-border, cross-currency money movement, payments and digital financial services empower consumers, businesses, financial institutions and governments across more than 200 countries and territories and over 130 currencies to connect with billions of bank accounts, millions of digital wallets and cards, and a global footprint of hundreds of thousands of retail locations. Its goal is to offer accessible financial services that help people and communities prosper. For more information, visit www.westernunion.com Media Contact: Alexandra Bell Screenverse [email protected] ID: 4 Share this Tasty content!

Zepz data: under-35s now majority of cross-border remitters. Zepz, the cross-border payments group behind the SendWave and WorldRemit brands, has published a five-year behavioural study drawing on data from more than 5.5 million unique senders across its network between May 2021 and May 2026. The findings challenge several established assumptions about who sends remittances, how often, and why. The headline finding is generational. Adults aged 25 to 34 now represent the largest single cohort of active senders on the Zepz network, accounting for 30% of unique users, with the 35 to 44 age group close behind at 27%. Together those two cohorts make up more than half of all senders. The 25 to 34 group more than doubled in number over the five-year period, a rate of growth the company describes as faster than any prior cohort. Interim chief executive Barrie Morris said the data reflects "a remittance economy in the middle of a genuine transformation." The gender shift. The report also tracks a sustained, year-on-year increase in the share of transactions initiated by women. Female senders reached 45.9% of all active users in 2025, up from a lower base in 2020. Among the 35 to 44 age group, women represent 49.9% of active senders, a level the report characterises as functional parity. The average gender gap in transfer value has narrowed from $16.51 per transaction five years ago to $6.42 in 2025. In several major send markets, including Italy, the US, Ireland, Germany and Canada, women now send more per transfer on average than men; the Italian figure shows women sending $25.58 more per transaction. That trajectory broadly aligns with Migration Data Portal estimates that women now account for 48% of all international migrants globally, suggesting that financial behaviour is tracking a structural demographic shift rather than a product-specific effect. Remitters as financial co-ordinators. Perhaps the most commercially significant finding concerns recipient complexity. Some 70.5% of Zepz customers now send to more than one recipient, up from 65.1% five years ago, and more than one in eight sends to recipients in more than one country, a 34% increase over the period. Transaction sizes remain predominantly small: 94.7% of transfers are below $250, and almost half fall below $50. Volume growth across the network averaged 12% over the past two years, with peaks of 35% in some periods, while average transfer values rose approximately 13%. The data also shows deliberate timing behaviour: transfers cluster around the first five days of the month, consistent with salary cycles, and Friday is the busiest single day of the week. December and March are the strongest months by both volume and value, aligning with Christmas and the Ramadan and Eid periods. Market context and competitive read-across. The broader cross-border payments market remains intensely competitive. Western Union and MoneyGram continue to hold large retail footprints, while digital-first challengers including Wise, Remitly and Zepz's own brands compete primarily on pricing transparency and mobile experience. The Zepz data makes an implicit commercial argument: if remitters are managing multi-recipient, multi-country financial responsibilities on a monthly cadence, the product surface expands well beyond a single-transfer utility. Digital wallets that allow customers to hold balances and deploy them on their own schedule represent the next logical product layer, and the report explicitly signals that Zepz is moving in that direction. That ambition carries regulatory weight. Wallet functionality that involves holding customer funds requires e-money or payment institution authorisation in most jurisdictions. In the UK, the FCA's safeguarding requirements for e-money institutions have tightened under ongoing Payment Services Regulation reviews, and similar obligations apply under PSD2 across the EU. Any expansion of wallet features will need to sit inside that framework, particularly given the FCA's increased scrutiny of non-bank payment firms holding client money. The report does not disclose revenue, market share or forward guidance. As a data-led research publication rather than a funding announcement, its primary function is positioning Zepz as a sophisticated interpreter of remittance behaviour at scale, a useful credential as the company continues to operate across a highly price-sensitive, trust-dependent market. AI level 1 of 5: written by Darlyn Ho; AI helped with tone, structure or wording; edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

Twenty one of the world's biggest banks are building their own stablecoin. Twenty one banks, from Goldman Sachs to Deutsche Bank, are forming a company to issue a dollar stablecoin by 2027, but a 140-company rival led by Visa and Stripe already launched Open USD in July and knocked nearly a fifth off Circle's stock. Goldman Sachs, Citi and Bank of America are leading 21 banks into a joint dollar stablecoin, but they're not just chasing Tether and Circle anymore. A second army of 140 companies got there first. The banking world spent a decade treating stablecoins as something crypto traders used to dodge dollar wire fees. That posture is officially dead. Twenty one of the largest financial institutions on earth, anchored by Goldman Sachs, Citi and Bank of America, have committed to forming a new company in the second half of 2026 that will issue a dollar-pegged stablecoin, with a target launch in the first half of 2027. A euro version is already queued up behind it. This isn't a pilot program buried in an innovation lab. The roster reads like a who's who of global finance: Capital One, Fidelity, PNC, Scotiabank, TD Bank, Wells Fargo and WisdomTree out of North America; Santander, BBVA, Commerzbank, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, Lloyds, Rabobank and UBS from Europe; MUFG, Standard Bank and Sirius International Holding covering Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The group started with just ten banks when it first went public in October 2025, according to reporting from Forkast and the Yahoo Finance crypto desk. It has more than doubled since. Here's what's actually driving this. The GENIUS Act gave stablecoin issuers in the U.S. a real regulatory framework for the first time, and banks read that as a green light rather than a warning label. The stablecoin they're building is designed to be both GENIUS Act and MiCA compliant, aimed at interbank payments, digital asset settlement and eventually retail use. For banks that have spent years watching Tether and Circle run the dollar-token business without a banking charter in sight, that's the opening they'd been waiting for. And the market they're chasing is genuinely shifting under everyone's feet. Tether's USDT still commands roughly 60% of the stablecoin market, with Circle's USDC holding a bit more than 20%. But their combined grip has slipped from 91.6% in March 2024 to around 84% today, based on data referenced in recent Cointelegraph and industry reporting. That eight-point erosion in under two years is exactly the kind of crack a 21-bank consortium wants to drive a wedge into. A 140-company consortium including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, and Coinbase launched Open USD on June 30, a stablecoin that returns reserve yield to partner businesses rather than keeping it, directly threatening Circle's core revenue model. Circle stock fell on the news as Coinbase, its own distribution partner, signed on as an OUSD... - stablecoin reserve profits competition - Visa Stripe Circle Tether rivalry Here's the part the banks probably didn't love discovering: they're now in a three-way fight, not a two-way one. On July 1, 2026, more than 140 companies, including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, Ripple, Google, IBM, Shopify and Western Union, announced Open Standard and its stablecoin, Open USD. It charges zero fees to mint or redeem, carries no volume caps, and shares nearly all of its reserve yield with partner companies instead of keeping it, which is a direct shot at the business model Circle has run since its IPO. The market reaction told you everything. Circle's stock dropped somewhere between 17% and 19% on the Open USD announcement, according to reporting from Decrypt and the Stockopedia newswire, as investors priced in a rival that gives away the thing Circle charges for. If a coalition of payment networks and tech giants can do that kind of damage to Circle in one announcement, a 21-bank consortium with actual balance sheets and existing corporate relationships is a different order of threat entirely. Frankly, the real prize here isn't retail wallets. It's the plumbing underneath corporate treasury. According to analysis from McKinsey and Artemis Analytics, business-to-business stablecoin payments grew 733% year over year to an estimated $226 billion annually. Hyundai Motor and Hyundai Card ran what they called the first cross-border stablecoin settlement by a Korean card company on July 9, 2026, moving $20,000 in USDT from Hyundai Motor America to Hyundai Motor de México over Avalanche in about seven minutes. The same transfer through correspondent banking would have taken three to four hours. Settlement on stablecoin rails runs roughly 0.5% to 2.5% in total cost, against 3% to 7% for traditional correspondent banking, industry cost comparisons show. That gap is why a consortium of banks with trillions in corporate clients wants in, not because crypto traders need another coin to speculate with. None of this guarantees the bank consortium wins. It doesn't even have a name yet, and 2027 is still more than a year out. Open USD is already live in the market it's chasing. What's certain is that the stablecoin business has stopped being a crypto-native sideshow that traditional finance could afford to ignore. Goldman Sachs, Citi and nineteen other banks just decided they'd rather build the rails than keep paying tolls on someone else's. Twenty-one major banks, including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs and UBS, committed on September 1 to launch a joint dollar stablecoin company targeting a first-half 2027 launch. Circle's stock fell 6% on the news, its second institutional hit this quarter after Morgan Stanley slashed its price target 64% in August. - circle stock drops major banks stablecoin - banks launch rival to USDC stablecoin Join the discussion. No replies yet. Start the discussion. Dave Barr is a professional Marketing Strategist With Over 6 Years Of Experience in PR. His primary area of expertise is public relations and social branding. Dave has been associated with various content projects from across the world on a regular basis. He has also had associations with big and reputed news networks. Dave contributes to Startup Fortune in the Business, Marketing and Technology sections.