Welcome to Western Union Investor Day. Please welcome Brad Windbigler, Treasury and Investor Relations.
Morning. For those of you joining us in person, welcome to the Denver headquarters. We're also live webcasting, welcome to those of you that are joining that way. We have a good agenda today. We're going to kick off with a strategic overview from Hikmet. While Hikmet's kicking us off, he's not leaving us, he's going to join us throughout, inviting several members of the management team to join and add color as he tells the story in several steps. We will go till about 10:20 A.M., after we hear from several leaders in the business, for a 20-minute break here in Denver, until 10:40 A.M. During that time, I would encourage, if you haven't already had the chance, there are several exhibits located just out to the back and to the right of the room.
You'll get some good color around the partnerships, part of our partnerships strategy, get some good examples of that, as well as technology and data in our business. At 10:40 A.M., Raj will wrap us up with an overview. As you may have seen in the press release, we have set 3-year targets. Raj will walk us through the build on that as well. We'll have 45 minutes of Q&A at the end of the day. For those of you in Denver, we'd invite you to join us for lunch, beginning at 12:30 P.M., and lasting about an hour. Okay. One other housekeeping note, the slides today will be available on the website. Those will be posted to The Western Union Company Investor Relations website. Now for the really good stuff, the safe harbor.
Just briefly, I'll refer you to the safe harbor statement. Today's meeting is recorded, and our comments include forward-looking statements. Please refer to the cautionary language in the press release and in Western Union's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the 2018 Form 10-K for additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. During the meeting, we will discuss some items that do not conform to generally accepted accounting principles. We've reconciled those items in the most comparable GAAP measures in the press release and on our website, westernunion.com, under the Investor Relations section. All statements made by Western Union officers during this meeting are the property of The Western Union Company and subject to the copyright protection.
Other than the replay noted in our press release, Western Union has not authorized and disclaims responsibility for any recording, replay, or distribution of the transcription of this call. Okay. We have a brief video and then we'll hear from Hikmet.
Please welcome Hikmet Ersek, Chief Executive Officer.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Colorado. Welcome to colorful Colorado. Also, from my side, a welcome to all who are on the webcast. Brad, thank you taking us through the agenda. Brad Windbigler is one of our most talented executives. He's actually running one of our core assets, which is Treasury Department, which, as you know, we move about $300 billion every year. He's really overseeing that. Additional to that, he will be also now responsible for investor relationship. We are very excited about his new function. You're going to interact with him in the future, with Brad. I would like to take a moment also to thank Mike Salop. Mike, thank you for your contribution. Are you here? Hi, Mike. Thank you for your contribution, Mike.
Mike has been a big contribution to Western Union, and we wish Mike you all the best for your future. Mike will be here for next few weeks, but I would like to thank you also, use the moment, and thank you, Mike. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are very excited, and we are looking very energized for our future. What will you hear today from us? You will hear our new platform strategy. First of all, we will talk to you about our global, resilient, purpose-driven business. We are here to stay. We are here to grow. We're going to talk you also how are we going to make our business even more agile? How are we going to open our platform to the new use cases? Serving multiple use cases, multiple customers with our new platform.
You will hear what that does mean for shareholders, for you. What does that mean for you? As you saw from this morning's press release, there are clear outcomes for you. The key takeaways are, first of all, an uplift in the financial performance. Our resilient business will generate an uplift for our core performance. We're going to constantly increase our margin, we target the 23% by 2022. We also target the low double-digit EPS CAGR the next three years. We really assume with a solid revenue growth here. Of course, we're going to continue to focus returning cash to our shareholders. Expect delivering $2.5 billion-$3 billion by 2022. One of the most exciting things we're going to talk, we're going to show you use cases, are the untapped potential, future potential by opening our platform.
While we are very confident about use cases, you're going to see that we have not included this in our revenue assumptions. I'm, as you know, talking a lot to you, getting your feedback. We, my team and I, meet you, one of the feedback we always get is that we like your resilient business, we like your execution, we like your purpose-driven business model, which delivers solid returns to shareholders. This is exactly what's happening while I'm standing here and while I'm talking to you. We do millions of cross-border transactions for millions of customers. We do the cross-border transactions easy for customers. While it's easy for the customers, the business is complex, the complexity of the business is our competitive advantage. It's hard to replicate. The price of entry is high.
It is, I believe, important for you to understand why it's a competitive advantage. Let me go deep inside our platform and walk you through what is needed to generate one single transaction. I'm going to walk you through to one single transaction from Paris to Nairobi. When you do the one single transaction, before you do a transaction, what do you need to go a country? You have to get a license. The payment industry is extremely regulated, and we operate in 200 countries. Either we have to get the license or we use the agent license in 200 countries. In that case, we need a license in France and in Kenya. We have to comply with local regulations. We have to report to the local regulators. We have to ensure that our agents also comply with the regulators.
The country rules change constantly, we have to make sure that we are on top of it. This is a competitive advantage because many startups and even many cryptocurrency projects underestimate that. The complexity of the regulatory environment is complex. It's a big competitive advantage. To make a transaction between Paris and Kenya, you have to create a brand. You have to create the trust with the customers. It's not easy to build the brand trust. We have built this trust with 150 million customers in 200 countries. It's hard-earned money from a customer in Paris. Sometimes half or 60% of their monthly salary goes back to support people. You give your hard-earned money to a trusted company like Western Union. You have to build the trust for many years. It's hard to replicate.
To do a transaction from Paris to Nairobi, you have to settle the transaction. You have to interact regularly with our complex network between bank accounts, digital wallets, and agent locations. In this particular case, you have to pay it in euros in France, collecting euros, and payout in shillings, Kenyan shillings, in Nairobi. We do it in 130 currencies. This is not all. We do it in minutes, real-time. As you saw from yesterday's announcement, we do it now also to an account in real-time. It's not only in the retail in 550,000 locations, we do it also real-time in 17 countries, and soon to be in 100 countries. To end-to-end transaction, you need a technology, obviously. A very sophisticated technology, which is up 24/7. It's a complex set of high-tech tools which connects point of sales, APIs, hosted solutions.
It's not only one agent, you connect the other agent, you connect 550,000 locations. You connect billions of accounts. You connect millions of wallets worldwide. This is layered with a very complex set of security protocols to protect our customers and their data. We have to have also top of this. I would like to mention here also, we are constantly investing here and finding synergies. Recently, we initiated a cloud migration journey, which will make our technology even more agile and even more better. Fifth, for one transaction, you need a global operation system. Not only for send customer, but also for the receive customer. Not only for the customers only, also for the agent, Frontline Associates, and for the receive Frontline Associates. This has to be multilingual support, has to connect the customer 24/7. For one transaction, you need compliance programs.
Compliance, of course, sits in the heart of us, everything we do. In particular transaction, you need between Paris and Nairobi compliance program, which meets the requirements of the local regulators. Not only we perform a compliance program for know your customer, but also for know your agent, know your front-line associate. We are performing in real-time, and you can see it outside, real-time with our artificial intelligence risk assessments for anti-money laundering, anti-fraud, and anti-terrorist financing. In addition to that, we apply the country pair limits. In the last five years, as you know, we invested more than $1 billion in our compliance programs in the technology. It's definitely the role model in the industry. Our compliance program is unbeatable. Finally, to do one transaction, you need a network.
You have to collect that transaction, either in a retail or from credit card or from account or from a wallet. You have to pay out this transaction, either in a retail or in an account or to a wallet. You have to build that. Our network is unbeatable. 550,000 locations in 200 countries. Billions of accounts, millions of wallets, 24/7, running and running. Now, this is what you need when I do one transaction in one country, and this is you need to receive a transaction in other country. All these things, what I told you, that complex. Try to replicate that. It's not easy. It's getting even better at Western Union. We process 25 transactions every second from 200 countries overall, and send and receive capabilities. This chart where you see is that all around our countries.
These are real-time transactions happened, we've consolidated together. You could see outside in our demo room afterwards, watch how transactions are happening. It's not only sending money from Paris to Nairobi, it's sending money from Sivas, Turkey to Almaty, Kazakhstan. From Denver, USA to Karachi, Pakistan. From UAE to Manila, Philippines. This is a huge balance portfolio. In fact, this has 20,000 country pairs, 20,000 corridors, country to country. In fact, this portfolio, if you look at that, none of our country pairs are bigger than 5% of our revenue. Number 10 country pair, it's already less than 1% of our revenue. We do transaction globally in 20,000 corridor. What a portfolio. What a competitive advantage to do these transactions. We are everywhere. As I said, we have 20,000 active corridors. We have 550,000 locations. We have more billions of accounts, 100 millions of wallets.
We have brand awareness in many countries, 90%. We settle in 130 different currencies. We have best-in-class compliance programs. Ladies and gentlemen, we are here to stay, and we are here to grow. As I said earlier, we are making easy for a customer to transfer from here to somewhere worldwide, and customers are happy. This business is complex and hard to replicate. Because of that, many banks globally and many retail shops globally have joined our agent network. With our open platform, many banks and new partners want to join our platform, and joining our platform. We were always innovative. We were always looking for new opportunities as Western Union. That is true for 168 years, by the way. Is it first telegram? Is it first commercial satellite? Is it first money transfer?
It's even the first time as we advised the U.S. government to buy Alaska from Russia. It was Western Union. With Greenland, I'm not mentioning anything there. This is unique. We're going to continue to be the leader in cross-border and cross-currency money movement and payments. I repeat again, cross-currency and cross-border money movement and payments. We saw that and said that, can we find additional opportunities? Can we make this platform more agile? What we realized is that as you heard from previous earnings calls, we start to implement our WU Way Lean management activities. Over the five years, we trained about 8,000 employees. Since 2016, we found process improvements, and we reinvested this process improvements where the savings back in our business. We also said that as we are focused on the cross-border, cross-currency money movement, how can we make our cross-border platform more agile?
We divested some of our domestic businesses like Speedpay and Paymap. Then we looked at our platform. We said, "Okay, can we restructure our organization really aligned to our new strategy?" We consolidated and optimized our global office footprint, consolidated roles and responsibilities, removed operating redundancies, thank you, across the global organization. We also committed to find additional savings by optimizing our sales of cost, in particular commissions, and really bring down our third-party spends. This new platform is ready. This cross-border platform has been never more agile and never been more ready to serve additional customers. When we talk about the cross-border platform, we talk about our core assets, compliance, operations, technology, settlement, brand, licensing, and network. This is needed to make a transaction cross-border, cross-currency. We have it in a very agile way. This is hard to replicate.
This is hard to do. What I'm going to do now is that we're going to take two examples of our cross-border, cross-currency platform capabilities. One is the compliance, and second is the network. I'm going to ask Jacqueline Molnar, our Head of Global Compliance, to come to stage. Jacqueline Molnar has built our compliance programs, is one of our most talented executives, has huge experience to build this compliance program, which is one of the best globally. Jacqueline will demonstrate also to you how our compliance programs not only will allow to grow our core business, but also serve third parties who want to use our platform. With that, I'd like to invite Jacqueline to stage.
Good morning, everyone.
Good morning.
Well, it's a real pleasure to be here. As Hikmet said, I'm going to take a few minutes and take you through our compliance journey, which I'm sure many of you remember because there were points at which I think 13 of 15 questions might've been about the compliance program. What we've done is we've really invested significantly in something that's now agile, efficient, effective, and ready to serve new customers and new third parties. It's really exciting stuff. Where did we start? You'll recall that in the early 2010s, the industry, not just Western Union, but the entire financial services industry, was suffering from increased enforcement expectations. We saw record-setting civil money penalties, reputational damage, cease and desist orders. It was a very aggressive environment. In addition to the environment, what we saw was a change in expectation.
For us, you'll recall that once upon a time, we sort of viewed our agent as a third party at arm's length. Behind that was their customer. The regulators all across the globe said, "No." You are responsible not only for overseeing that agent, but also protecting their customer as though they were yours. What did we do? We took a step back and we decided we're going to play the long game. We are not going to just fix it here and there or whatever regulator wants this or that. We're going to step back and completely revamp the program with an eye to being able to admit new third parties and other customers as well as our own brand. What did we do? Well, first we had to hire a lot of talent. People from banks, fintechs, mathematicians, data scientists.
We hired a team with all kinds of experience, brought them in, built a plan, used very strict agile lean practices, built a program. Because this was really a no room for failure moment. We had to deliver. We had to execute. There was just no choice. We built out that plan. The result, a best-in-class sophisticated program that we've built it, now they can come. It's ready to serve, and I'm going to give you an example of some of the things that we're already doing. Let me give you the ecosystem. You've already heard it. We invested $1 billion. However, just throwing money at things doesn't work unless you have a significant plan and you execute against it. What we've been able to do is open up our ability to operate in over 200 countries and territories. You heard that we have 20,000 country pairs.
Below this in compliance, we actually now have the capability through robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence to go across as many as 30,000 country pairs. We can go below that into city pairs. An example would be Spain to Morocco. A transaction from Madrid to Marrakech could be different than a transaction from Barcelona to Casablanca. Depends on the customer, the attributes of the transaction, and we can literally apply real-time compliance at scale. This is something that is a special skill across the planet that I'm unaware that anybody else has that capability. Also, in this environment, this is not unique to us. In the last five years, we've had 650 exams, audits, third-party reviews. Big banks come in, and anybody who had this level of global presence would experience exactly the same thing.
This is not unique to us, but it's very difficult to replicate this. On any given day, we have the likelihood of an examiner being here looking at our program. The good thing about that is it gives us constant, independent, and external confirmation that the program is operating properly. Let me give you a couple of examples. I'm going to give you two. One about protecting our agent, one about protecting our customer. Why is this important to investors? Obviously, if we're protecting our own customers, the customers of others, the well-being of third parties, their reputations, they know that we're not going to damage their customers, damage them. We're more likely to be competitive. The other thing about this is based on what we've done with technology, much of which we literally invented. We literally invented it in the past five years.
Some of it we have patents on. Some of it we have patents pending. This is very attractive because it's attractive to have a secure transaction and know that you, your reputation and your customer is not in jeopardy. Example, iWatch Go. We have a case management system called iWatch. It's where we enter everything. In India, in about 2012, 2013, we were able, in an environment where we have about 100,000 locations, we were able to visit on-site between 1,000 and 3,000. The regulator said to us and everybody else in the industry who was operating about the same level, "Not good enough. Not a significant enough sample.
You've got to do something else." What we were doing is we were taking our pens and pencils with a very well-trained compliance officer with their questions, going into the agent, asking questions, making sure that everything was functioning. We require a compliance officer at every agent and just making sure everything was fit and proper. Go back to the office, type it in, goes up in the case management system. We could replicate that about 3,000 times a year. Then the compliance officer would subjectively, with some guidelines, decide what to do to follow up. Well, wasn't good enough. What did we do? So exciting. We actually invented, and by invent, when I use the word invent, I mean it in the patent sense, a series of questions to which the officer could answer yes or no. Very well-trained compliance officer.
Let me give you an example of a complex question. Is the agent's compliance officer competent? There's a lot of training and judgment that goes into that. Although it's a yes or no answer, it's a tough one to answer, and there's got to be some backup and data. Anyway, they're there with their device. They're entering these answers. We're weighting them in real time. You can imagine if the answer to, "Is the compliance officer competent?" is no, we actually have the ability to shut off the point of sale or do something less dramatic, push some training. All of this is being uploaded in real-time, going into our systems so that we can predictively analyze where to be next. We also did travel patterns, so the compliance officer would know where they had to be when. When they're there, we're geotagging them.
Trust but verify you're not in your basement. You're there. You're at the location. We're geotagging the point of sale and doing the mathematics on the location and risk ranking it. What were we able to do? We went from 3,000 a year to last year we did 25,000 reviews. Why is that relevant? Why is that important? Well, it helps us preserve our license. It helps us keep our agents safe. It makes sure there isn't illicit activity flowing through those locations. It makes us competitive. If you want to partner with us in India, you're less likely to have problems. We're very proud of that. Thanks to all the inventors that may be listening out in the lobby. All right.
Coming to Western Union, we have really special customers, and this is a customer example, and this is one of the things that really gives me fire in the belly to come here. I think in addition to doing the right thing, it's very competitive. Let me tell you about this example. As you know, fraud exists. Financial institutions, no matter what you are, if you're a money services business, a bank, credit union, people are looking to move money for illicit purposes, and one of them is fraud. What I mean here by fraud are sort of those romance scams, pardon me, tax, lottery, something like that. What we're seeing is this is becoming more and more pernicious and prevalent across the world and more sophisticated. These stats are from the U.S., but we're seeing it all over the world.
You'll remember a few years ago, you'd get an email. It was replete with spelling mistakes and festooned with odd icons, and you could tell that it was pretty fake. Now, not the case. Very sophisticated. In fact, I had one that I actually tested. Telephone number, call center, an actual call center backing it up, people answering the phone to help you and convince you why your transaction is secure. All financial institutions have to do this, seeing it all across the globe. What I love about this, when we took a crack at this over the last few years, as the globe went up, we went down. When we first took our big swing, we dropped it like a hockey stick.
That flat line that you see is when we were instituting hundreds, literally hundreds of hotline capabilities, access through websites for customers to let us know if they'd been a victim of fraud. Surprisingly, when we thought it would go up, it remained flat. I'm not going to tell you the secret sauce, but through some very sophisticated predictive analytics, and we nailed it, we got it right. In the last year, we've dropped it in half again. In my view, there can't be anything more competitive than making sure the transactions are secure and protected and our customers are protected. For that, yet another external confirmation of the effectiveness and the efficiency of the program is that we've received accolades all over the world. The Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, Oceania.
This is not just for fraud, but this is for awarding our teams for disrupting scourges like human trafficking, drug dealing, and just keeping that out of our system. We've managed to do it. It protects us. It protects our customers, our agents, and it's the right thing to do. This is what really gets people excited about coming here. As you can see, we're already partnering with very prestigious global brands all over the world. The way that we've built our technology, it's scalable. We can operate, we can hum at the same level of efficiency and effectiveness at low times as at peak times, and we've got lots of capacity. This is incredibly exciting that we can open this up. We all win. We win, you win. We're ready. We've built it. They can come. Thank you.
Thank you, Jacqueline. That was impressive.
Thank you.
That's exciting, actually. That shows also this is unique. To my knowledge, nobody has that in the industry. To my knowledge, all the recognitions you get from the regulators, this is unique. It was hard work, and she built it. We are ready. It's not only ready for our customers in the C2C business, but we are also ready to get other partners here to open our platform. One of the capabilities which is the backbone is compliance programs. When we accept transactions from third party, we do the compliance checks for them. It is huge. Now, I would like to introduce the next platform capability, which is network. Rather than me presenting this, Jean-Claude Farah will present. Jean-Claude Farah and I been working together for many, many years. Jean-Claude Farah and I been going to the most remote areas in the world to open locations.
We will wake up early in the morning in early years of Western Union, we will say, "Which country do we open today? Which location do we open today?" He built an enormous network worldwide, now he's building an omni network. It's not only our retail network, it's also our account and wallet network. On top of that, he really, and we really want to be the real-time engine for all transactions globally, for all cross-border, cross-currency transaction. With that, without further ado, I would like to introduce Jean-Claude Farah.
Thank you, Hikmet. Good morning, everyone, welcome to the world of global network at Western Union. You heard from Jacqueline about the power of compliance, let me tell you one thing. Everyone, anyone can be compliant if they have one location or they have one active app in one country. The complexity kicks in when you are offering your services in more than 550,000 locations, several apps across multiple geographies and to billions of accounts. It is this combination of compliance and network reach that Western Union has continuously improved throughout the years, which makes it appealing for partners and third parties to work with us. At WU Network, our mission is to expand into the world's ultimate agnostic network for payments and cross-border money movement. There is a caveat to that. It should be done with the right blend of cost, coverage, and quality.
Remember this acronym, CCQ. I will explain more as I will move forward into the presentation. Let's take a look now at the world's largest digital and physical money movement network. In the past, we used to serve a C2C, brick-and-mortar to brick-and-mortar customer need. We used to serve one use case, cash at the funds in, cash at the funds out. What we have built since is the world's largest digital and physical money movement network with 550,000 locations spanning 200 countries and territories, web and app transactional capabilities in 70 countries, bank account payout capabilities in more than 100 countries, providing access to billions of accounts and millions of wallets. Currently, we serve many use cases. If a customer would like to send a transaction from an app and pick it up in cash, we can do it.
If he or she would like to send it from an account and make it land on an account, we can do it. Cash to account, cash to wallet, app to account. I think you got it. You name it, we enable it. These milestones were achieved by people. Believe me, it takes a specific breed of people to go to Nigeria, meet with the central bank, and get us approval to operate. It takes ethnic-savvy individuals to meet with prospects in Japan and turn them into partners. At Western Union Network, we speak the language, we live the culture. We have proven resilient for 168 years, transformed and expanded our reach. We are starting from a position of strength to deliver on our mission, what we have created is hard to replicate. Let's have a closer look into the structure of our unmatched retail presence.
If you allow me, I don't like animations too much, so I'm going to put everything on the slide. I see in the room many people agree with me. When the Western Union Network is mentioned, many images would sprint to mind. Some of us, some of you would think retailers. Others are going to think banks and FIs. Some others are going to think mom-and-pop shops. Let me tell you one thing. Western Union Network is all of the above and some more. 51% of our network is comprised of banks and financial institutions. I will take one example. In Saudi Arabia, the second-largest remittance market in the world, Bank Albilad, one of the leading banks in the country and an undisputed leader in terms of remittance, who did they partner with? Western Union.
16% of our network is post offices. I would like to call out La Banque Postale, one of the biggest brands in France, one of the most renowned brands in France. Who did they choose to partner with for their domestic and cross-border remittance? Western Union. 33% of our network is comprised of supermarket, convenience stores, and retailers. I was just in Mexico two days ago. Leading retailers like Elektra, who pays out more than 60% of all the remittances sent to Mexico through their 1,800 network locations, who did they elect to partner with? Western Union. Kroger, Walgreens in the U.S. on the sending side, Western Union is the partner. These household names that started as our retail partners are now becoming part of our digital offering expansion. What we have achieved in the cash-to-cash business will now be replicated into the digital area.
Let's take a look now at our digital payout capabilities. We have currently access to billions of accounts and millions of wallets in 100 countries. You heard Hikmet saying that. We will continue expanding to reach 160 countries by 2022. The most interesting part is that out of these 100 countries, there are 17 countries that are enabled with real-time capabilities. In those 17, you can count the top 4 remittance markets in the world, receive markets like China, India, Philippines, and Nigeria. We didn't start our real-time capabilities only with small countries. We went for the big fish. Let me give you an example of a customer in the U.S. sending a transaction from a card to an account to India. On the send side, you have a customer using his or her card, sending a transaction to India to an account.
Today, this transaction will take an average of about a minute. This is the power of our real-time capabilities. You heard me saying that what we have built is hard to replicate, but what we are building now with our real-time capabilities is even harder to replicate. This is our promise to you. This slide depicts exactly what we were and what we are becoming. While in the past, we used to have one customer, the Western Union-branded products. Currently and in the future, we are opening up our platform and network to partners and third parties, enabling them to deliver cross-border money movement in real time to their own customers. Western Union will remain our anchor tenant but will not be our only customer. The future, by the way, has started already.
Currently, we are serving the likes of Amazon in the e-commerce space, SberBank in Russia in the banks and FIs arena, and Saudi Telecom in the telecommunication industry. You can see that we started delivering on our future, and the future started today. You heard me talking about CCQ in the beginning. Now I would like to share with you how this will help us put our strategy into action. CCQ, cost, coverage, and quality. I'm going to start with the cost. Let me address the elephant in the room. Agents commission is our biggest expense, and this expense will come down. That's our promise to you. We will focus on commission optimization through direct negotiations with our current network. We will add cost-efficient payout methods and activate receiver-driven models. Let me give you an example here. A customer is sending a transaction from the U.S.
All my examples start with the U.S., anyway, that's a good thing. A customer is sending a transaction from the U.S. to the Philippines. The sender, nothing changes on their side. They send their transactions to the receiver in the Philippines. It is the receiver who will make the choice, either picking it up in cash in a location or pulling it into a wallet. If we can make that receiver pull that transaction into a wallet instead of picking it up in cash, this will result in a cost saving that will drive down the effective commission rate for that market. This is one example among many. On the coverage side, we will go for the channel mix, both retail and digital. Remember, yesterday we were retail. Today and tomorrow, we are retail and digital. We will do white space mapping and fill in the blanks.
We will leverage alternative payout methods that will cover an even larger array of customers. On the quality side, we will focus on the agent experience. It is our responsibility to make it easier for agents to connect to us. We will focus on third party and user experience, how we can ensure that the customers of third parties are satisfied and they are coming back to us. We will expand our Stage and Pay beyond the current 80 countries. Let me take one example here. Let me take a moment and explain it to you. Stage and Pay is when our customer start the transaction on their app, but they conclude it in a location. What do we achieve with that? First of all, it is the speed.
Second of all, it's the connection that we have already created with that customer, the digital connection that we have created with our customer. Start on your app, conclude in the location. This is my favorite slide of all, maybe because it's the last one. This is my favorite slide in this presentation, and it is about the key takeaways. If I had to leave the audience here today, if I had to leave all of you today with only three thoughts, those would be: first, we will expand the world's ultimate agnostic network for payments and cross-border money movement. This is our promise to you. Two, we will harness the power of our unique physical and digital combination, a combination that no one can claim. Three, we will open up the network and real-time capabilities to third parties to drive growth. Thank you. May the CCQ be with you.
This was great. Obviously, JC also showed us how we are going to win and deliver our promise. One day our network could be 1 million locations. Maybe some of them are Western Union-branded, some of them not. I believe that we're going to have access to all accounts globally and drop money in minutes. We will have millions of wallets want to join our capability and our network to drop money or send money like stc does it. That's really our vision, opening our platform, really doing that because we have the assets. We have the assets. We have the capabilities, two capabilities of our platform. You heard it today. It's impressive. This opens also to use cases. What are we going to serve? We're going to serve the C2C use cases, to C2B, B2C use cases, and B2B use cases.
The good news is that the market opportunity is there. The cross-border money movement, it's a huge market. The largest part of our current business looks like is in the smallest part of the C2C business. We operate in a very stable, growing market by 4%. First time, the remittances globally overtook the FDIs, foreign direct investments, $700 billion, growing by 4%. The good news here is that the yields here are the highest in the industry compared with C2B, B2C, and B2B. We are definitely a market leader here at the C2C, and we have the opportunity with our platform to grow here, but also attract new use cases in C2B and B2C sector. Another good news is that the economic trends are in favor for us.
Despite all the political discussion happening globally with anti-migration discussions and everything, the fact is that the migration won't stop. Today, there are about 275 million people living abroad in the country where they not were born, 275 million. The estimate says that by 2025, this number will be 300 million. The GDP and the need for migrants going to continue to happen as the aging population in the developed countries happening, and also the need for migrants are increasing. The other good news is also that the developing countries' GDP is growing in average about by 4%. You will ask, okay, these are the developing countries. Why it's good for your business? The developing countries are growing their economy, are becoming ascent countries. We create new corridors every time when the economy prospers in the country. I give you a number.
Our intra-Africa business, within Africa countries, it's more than $1 billion in a year in principle, and growing by 20%. Sending money from Ghana to Uganda, from Uganda to Egypt, from Egypt to South Africa, from South Africa to Ivory Coast. These are good news. The market is there where we operate. The other trend is the global e-commerce trend. The e-commerce is growing rapidly. The cross-border e-commerce is expected to make the cross-border. Can we have the next slide? Here we are. The cross-border e-commerce is expected to make up 20% of all e-commerce trade by 2022. In fact, e-commerce player like Amazon are expecting to reach out to new customers, but also collect funds for their purchases. Consumers transact in local currencies in the countries where they are. Most of the transactions are done in local currencies.
There are about 20 billion payments cards globally, 20 billion where you can make a payment. 60% of them are domestic cards. If you want to buy cross-border a good. You can't purchase the good because you have only domestic payment methods. Our platform enables to change domestic payments to international payments. This is unique, and we can do that. As I said, the external factors are in our favor. Our platform is to capture these opportunities of multi-use cases. The team is ready to execute that. Let me go back to one opportunity, which is our core business, the C2C opportunity. As you know, the consumer's here. This business has been our foundation, a stone for our profitability and the resilience of Western Union. We have room to grow here. Today, we have 12% principal market share. Revenue market share is different.
Principal market share. We have opportunity to grow. You're going to hear now from Khalid Fellahi, one of our most talented executive in the company, who built our digital business from scratch, and it's our fastest-growing part of our company. He's going to talk about our C2C opportunities, how we're going to grow our core business. With that, I would like to invite Khalid to stage. I believe before Khalid comes, we have one video, a customer video, which we would like to play.
I'm Vamsi. I'm a machine learning engineer working in Silicon Valley. Sending money home is a deep-rooted value of gratitude for the love and support my family gives me, and I have a sense of responsibility. I send money to Amma, my younger brother, and for my own savings and investments. My mother, Veena, still lives in Pune, my hometown in India, while my brother studies in Toronto, Canada, as an undergraduate. Every month, I have a little reminder to transfer money back home. I hop onto the Western Union app to simply repeat the monthly transfer to my mother. In just a few simple clicks, I move money to my mother, who lives in a time zone 12 hours away. Even though my mother has an online bank account, she loves to walk to the Western Union location to pick up her money literally within minutes.
My little brother, Sarang, is a clever boy. He is on a full scholarship from his college in Toronto and is financially independent for his young age. Now and again, he still needs some support from his big bro, and I'm happy to help. He needed cash for a science club activity, and once again, my Western Union app came in handy. I used the quick resend to transfer the amount Sarang needed. He simply had to cross the street to pick up his money from a Western Union location. It was as easy as picking up a cup of coffee. I send savings back home, and I also use Western Union to send money to myself. I bought my dream apartment back in Pune with my savings, and now I need to top up my bank account regularly to service my monthly automated mortgage payments.
Western Union sweetens it for me when they offer me good exchange rates. I guess they recognize that I'm a frequent sender of money and a regular high-value sender. I'm happy with my choice. Getting a great rate and having money immediately paid out into my account means my money is working smarter for me.
Please welcome Khalid Fellahi, Consumer Money Transfer.
Hello, everybody. It's always the same thing when I see stories like this. It's unstoppable. It's a love of son for his mother. It's somebody who cares about his brother and somebody envisioning life. That's unstoppable. It's not going to stop. Together at Western Union, we serve the likes of Vamsi. We serve them, whether they come from India, from Morocco, from Laos, from Chad, anywhere in the world. They are the strongest people that I can know of, and they all have the same stories, the same loyalty, the same passion. It's the same ambitions. There are 272 million of them. Actually, I would say 272 million of us. I, as well as many people who are sitting on this side and on this side of this room here, are actually similar people.
We come from some other place, and we continue sending money back home or to our loved ones because we need to support them. We understand exactly what these people are going through, and I can tell you one thing. It's no wonder that the remittance flows are so resilient, and they keep growing. According to the World Bank, now the remittance volume is actually bigger than the foreign direct investment in economies, actually the emerging economies, which is 80% of the flows and of developing assistance. Human migration is such a powerful economic force, and even in times of economic downturn, these flows continue. When you have your disposable income, as we said it before, it first goes to support your family. It does not stop whether the economy is good or not.
It may flatten a little bit, but it doesn't stop, and it keeps growing, and it grows at 4% for the next three years. Sorry, just a minute. The economic pressure, as Hikmet just said it before, conflicts or simply the fact that in most of the developed countries or the developed world, there's the population pressure
That means that these aging populations need young workers, that means that migration is going to continue to be fueled for the foreseeable future. It's not going to stop. Our market is something that we believe is very solid. It's a very solid foundation. Now, we have been serving these global citizens for many years. We have a very enviable position in terms of market share, but it's actually even more in terms of revenue, most probably. When we look a little bit at the market structure, though, from a payout perspective, cash payouts on the one hand and bank payout on the other hand. According to our estimates, actually bank payouts in terms of remittances are actually bigger than cash payouts. Now, when you look at Western Union's profile today, it's a little bit different.
We're much bigger in the cash payout because we started serving all of these people, sending money to emerging economies where cash is more prevalent and more desired. Our bank payout is actually still a small portion of our business. Now, we have acquired the position and very enviable position in the cash business because of our brand at 550,000 locations. That's actually a position of strength. In the account payout where we see growth actually much faster than in the cash payout that we have today, we have now a very long runway for growth, and it represents a massive opportunity for us. As Jean-Claude just pointed out earlier, creating that infrastructure that allows us to move money in minutes into more than 100 countries around the world today and globally in the near future. That means that for us, it's all about opportunity.
For us, it's very simple. It's all about ubiquity. It's always been the story of Western Union. Whether you want to send $100 or whether you want to send $10,000 or $50,000, we have to have a solution for you if you're a consumer. That's who we serve. Western Union has many assets. Our platform is unrivaled. Our network is amazing. The most important one is actually our customer base. It's our very, very loyal customer base. 150 million consumers, of which 65 million senders and 85 million receivers, are trusting us to move money around the world. For us, as you can see here by the next one, what is very important is that 80% of our revenue is generated by repeat customers. Not only this population of customers is global, but they are loyal. They're repeat customers.
They keep giving us their business. Why? They trust us. They're entrusting us with the most important thing that they do every month, sending money to their mom. That's a very solid foundation. That means our business is very resilient. When we expand to new channels, so for example, wu.com or digital, what we can see is that 80% of the new customers that are coming to our channel are actually new to the franchise and new to the company. It's actually the same thing when it comes to bank payout. When we see people coming to do bank payout with us, it's actually 70% new customers. It's higher if you actually look in reality, even our existing customers, they send to new receivers. For us, it's all incremental business. The Western Union brand is also a formidable asset.
We have a 90% brand recognition amongst the target group of customers that we target around the world. The most searched brand on Google, if you just go to Google Trends, is Western Union. It's actually more than all of the major money transfer brands combined today. Even in the digital world, our name still means something. The reason why this is happening is because the likes of Wamsi, they trust us for the convenience, for the peace of mind whenever they send the money, our brand is attractive to them. Now, Hikmet said it's all about customer centricity. For us and for me, as I manage this Consumer Money Transfer, it's all about building things around the customer, about to keep them, to attract them, and actually offer more services to them. Our strategy is very simple.
Going forward, we just want to keep our very winning strategy of digital first. In particular, our global extension. According to our business intelligence, that market is growing about 20% range, in the 20% range in terms of $ volume. We'll continue investing in that. Next, you're going to hear us talk more and more about the lifetime value of customers, not about transactions, but about the lifetime value of customers. In that case, we're creating the infrastructure to have a more tailored and personal experience for our customers. Finally, we will strengthen our position in retail, still a big part of our business, but we will be focusing on what we call our flagships and locations. We call them the Platinum Network.
In this case, we'll be creating new experiences, and we'll be expanding best practices to the rest of the network as we see them happening. That's basically our strategy. Let me start with the first one. I love this slide. Eight years ago, we embarked in a transformation of our digital business. We focused on the customer. That's when I moved to the U.S., by the way. Hikmet told me, like, "You go and do this." We built a digital native platform. We built a powerful data and technology infrastructure that can sustain our business at a global scale. We developed a strong base of digital talent for product, marketing, decision science, technology all around the world, in the U.S., in Europe, India. We leveraged our operating and technology centers that we have around the world. It's not only about the U.S. We are global.
Just remember that. We became the largest revenue-generating business in cross-border digital money transfer. We turned around the business, we accelerated that business so that we grew six times in revenue and 12 times in terms of principal moved. That's the numbers between 2010 and 2018. If you can see this, we actually did go already through a very successful transformation. We expanded geographically with over 70 countries live today. This would have been much harder if we did not have a unique platform, if we did not have that brand that means so much to our customers, and we didn't have the support systems that deal with the complexity of moving money internationally with a variety of regulations, currencies, local ecosystems. The good news, though, is that as we did that, we're actually just starting in markets that are actually huge opportunities.
If I just look at the Gulf countries, Saudi, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, we're just starting our digital business there, but it's $120 billion outbound market that we have not yet taken really to scale. If you look at China or India, that's another $25 billion. We haven't even started the business there. Newcomers to this industry may be on par in terms of technology, but it is hard to match the brand, the scale, and variety of delivery choices and the service that we offer customers globally. I think we move money at a scale that nobody can match today. We do not limit the digitization to our digital customers only. What we embarked on is to make sure that we also serve our customers digitally in retail. What does that mean?
We want them to actually start always on an app when they engage with us, when they're looking for the service, when they want to understand something about the service, when they want to price the service. We want them to start engaging with us on the app. We want them to actually prepare the transaction, we call it staging, before they actually walk into the location. Right? That in that case, when they go to the location, it will be very fast. It will happen in a few seconds instead of a few minutes. They don't have to fill a form. We don't have to do data entry. We want to offer them all of the benefits of the digital world. Today, everybody has a smartphone and expects that. Basically, in this case, we can increase their convenience. They can store their data.
They can easily repeat transactions. They can get their status updates. They don't have to call somebody. They can get their history. They can access location mapping and on and on and on. It provides us also with something which is, I believe, the most valuable, which is creating that direct customer engagement relationship with our retail customers. Today, it happens over the counter. They come in, and then they go. With this, what we want to do is create a conversation. We want to create the opportunity to provide them with services, such as reminders, such as maybe offers. We want to create that real connection that we don't have over the counter.
As that works and as that builds up, we believe this is a win-win-win proposition for the customer first, for Western Union, as we create that engagement, and for agents, because our agents would see a lot more productive transactions, seconds instead of minutes. Our digital strategy expands beyond our wu.com assets. Partnering with institutions that we call institutions that have captive audiences beyond the wu.com assets. They have customers that go to their properties. They have customers that trust them. In that case, what we do is we increase our penetration. We are on more shelves, right? That also helps us improve our marketing. It becomes variable, right, instead of an upfront investment. We are opening our platform, and we recently launched co-branded services, for example, with Kroger in the U.S. and with the Post Office in the U.K.
We're very flexible in our go-to-market strategy, and we adjust as locally fit. Direct to market, co-branded, white label. Our intent is to occupy all of the relevant spaces and have several options on the shelves for our consumers. We'll be there wherever they want us to be. Something I'm extremely excited about is what we call the maximization of lifetime value, second pillar of our strategy. Maximizing lifetime value means, by definition, that it's a perfect balance between your customer needs and the economic opportunity for us. It's about getting loyalty and share of wallet. It's about constantly sticking to the customer's needs and the elasticities that you can build a very long-term relationship. That's actually going to be, going forward, really the center of how we measure our revenue.
The way we do this is to personalize our offers in order to match in the best way possible the preferences of each customer and gain the maximum share of wallet. We want all of their business. I told you, we can send $100 or $10,000. We can pay in cash, we can pay in account. There's no reason why actually a customer should be looking somewhere else. We just have to match their expectations each time. As we saw with Vamsi, there are three use cases that Vamsi had. The first one was to send money to his mother. In that case, the most important criteria was that the location was not too far from where his mother lives. That's actually the choice that he's going to be making for that particular use case. The second one, he was sending money to his brother.
What's the most important there? The criteria is that he wants his brother to pick up the money after classes. That means that there's a location available at 8:00 P.M. The third one, where he sends money for his investment, is the FX because he wants to have a good deal. Every time, what you have to do is stick to the use case and make sure that you're giving him the exact thing that he's waiting for, and then you can price it appropriately for each use case. It doesn't have to be the same thing all the time. We have a lot of data of other customers, both existing and first visitors. It allows us to better understand their profile and use cases, as I just mentioned with Vamsi.
Whether it's the social graph, the engagement behavior, they came, they came back, they're moving slowly, they came from a certain channel, they're away from home. We can see that they're 1,000 miles away from where they are usually living. The channel, the day, the time, we know all of that information, and all of that helps us make a determination of what is the best offer and what is actually the most important for our customer. Using decision science, we can adapt our offer dynamically to match those criterias and service elements for a long-term relationship at the right price. This type of analysis is not new for us, by the way. We've been doing this for several years.
The only thing is we were doing it more at the bottom of the funnel, making sure that using decision science and artificial intelligence to ensure that we didn't have the bad guys coming through the system. We have developed capabilities and we have developed talent that allows us now to take that intelligence. We had the security guard, if you like, at the bottom of the funnel to take that intelligence and actually move it up a notch to help our customers have better offers. You saw this before. This is our business, 200 countries to 200 countries, right? No corridor has a way that is over 5%, and most of them are sub 1%. Every one of these corridors, at the same time, has its own characteristics. It's about our network on both sides of that corridor. It makes a difference.
It gives you a different ability to actually have premiums. It's about the currency volatility between those corridors. It's about the regulations, the brand awareness. If you take this picture and draw the same picture city to city, you'd have something a lot more complex. What that gives us is the ability to differentiate our offers at actually a very granular level. We call it micro corridors. If we take pricing, we can see that just using a few simple data points, we can already price dynamically to a customer and transaction. Instead of adjusting yields in a wholesale process, we can adjust better to time and space. Wherever you're transacting at what time. We've already done this at corridor level for a long time. This just helps us take it up a couple of magnitudes further in the sophistication.
As a matter of fact, we're already doing this. We're already actually piloting these programs. What I'm trying to tell you here is instead of having just a store where there are items on the shelf, we're bringing inside that store some intelligence. We're bringing in the salesman. That's what I call the salesperson inside the store. From a pricing standpoint, what you can see here is that we move from static to dynamic pricing. We move from transaction-based pricing to a customer-based pricing. Every customer has unique attributes. From a transaction yield view in terms of how we look at our revenue to a lifetime value, making sure that we maximize the lifetime value with our customers. Now, beyond price, it's not about just building a relationship that is just based on price.
As you build this interaction with the customers, you can actually have an ecosystem that may be building, may bring in maybe some valuable services. For example, in this case, you have a customer that just needs a pitch. That's what I call a pitch. You can recognize who's that customer, and then they're ready to actually go and do their service, but they're still hesitating. You tell them that right there and then, "Hey, the money can be there in 10 minutes, and it's going to be at FX rate that is guaranteed." That's enough to actually move the customer into doing that submit. That's what I call the sales guy. Helps you actually make the buy. Sometimes it's about a nudge. It's about giving the extra thing. For example, you can actually add value to the transfer. "Hey, I'm giving you life insurance.
If you do the transaction now, for the next 30 days, you're covered. If something happens to you, we'll continue sending money, or we'll give a lump sum of money to your loved ones. Sometimes, yes, you have to make a deal. When you have that intelligence, you can now make these determinations. You don't have to have just a flat offer. You can create a real engaged and personalized relationship. Now, the third pillar of our strategy, the Platinum Network, our flagship locations. We know that if we focus on the customer benefits, always going to be about the customer first, we can build a series of experiences that help us create more loyalty, good word of mouth, and lifetime value maximization because they'll keep coming back to our locations.
Simple examples for this kind of network are that you ensure that you have enough offer in terms of time of availability. That's actually worth a premium. We're carefully selecting locations and see how we can actually make that happen. Another one is, we've asked customers, that actually they want to go to retail. That's the way they like to transact. That's the way they feel comfortable, they don't necessarily want to pay only in cash. Sometimes they want to use their card. They just feel comfortable to give you the plastic and see it swiped instead of putting online. If that's their preference, we want to be able to do that. There are a lot of things that we can do around our retail. We can digitize, we can build priority lanes, we can actually have incentive programs for our FLAs, frontline associates.
We can have real-time marketing offers. All of that ecosystem we're building around those flagship locations. In the past 20 minutes, I told you about the key pillars of our strategy for our core business, the Consumer Money Transfer, as a strong foundation for future growth. We're building the foundation to go to the next level. It's not only about offering a service, it's about building a relationship. It's about building a long-term relationship with our customers. The first one was about the digital-first. Remember, there were only three things. We continue to expand geographically everywhere. We deepen the offer within a country by partnering up with other third parties. We go to captive audiences. We also engage our retail customers now in a digital way. That's our program.
The second one was about this personalization using artificial intelligence, using predictive analytics, our ability to tailor the offer to our consumers and to our customers every time they come to us to match their criteria. We can do this dynamically. Number 3, focusing on really the Platinum Network where we make a difference, create best practices, and then expand around the world. With these three pillars, we believe that we have a very strong foundation for future growth. Thank you very much, and I hope you continue this session very well. Thank you.
Thank you, Khalid. Great story, the story has not finished. The story continues. Obviously, you heard today how we build our platform, how we're opening our platform, how is our platform going to be more agile, and how is this platform going to serve Khalid's business? A stable, resilient growth opportunities business. I'm very excited about the dynamic pricing part. Given the stable prices currently in the market, additional finding dynamic opportunities on pricing, additional revenue opportunities, breaking down to city pairs, bring that street corner pricing automatically with artificial intelligence. We can do that, and we are doing that, started to do that. It's exciting. As I mentioned, the opportunities don't stop here. Our platform can serve additional customers. As you know, we started our payments journey a few years ago, actually eight years ago, with the acquisition of Travelex.
Now, although the market opportunity is huge, our results in the particular business were mixed. It's mid-single-digit growth rates. However, we believe there's a huge opportunity for us opening our platform now with our new strategy to these new segments. We really believe on this opportunity. The Western Union Business Solutions has given us the experience. We learned a lot how to go after verticals, how to go after new use cases, how to acquire new businesses. We're going to show you now some use cases, how we're going to expand our business to these new opportunities. Andrew Summerill, who is the interim President of WU Business Solutions, will show you some use cases. Afterwards, Rebecca Leavengood will show you our Amazon partnership as a use case. That will really show you how excited we are about opening our platform to the new use cases. With that, Andrew.
Thank you, Hikmet. Morning, all. I'll take you through the exciting world of payments, and some use cases are the best way to demonstrate our assets. As you'd imagine, a marketplace of $21 trillion comes with a lot of players and opportunity, we think we're well-placed to be in that space and grow our market share. We have a tremendous diversity within our client base. We deal with small and medium-sized enterprises, corporates, NGOs, law firms, and universities. We're able to serve that diverse base because of the assets within the business. We have over 70 licenses and registrations. We're present in 40 countries, we have access to 500 bank accounts in-country where we can basically make a payment to any bank account in the world.
We can also receive a payment from any bank account in the world, and we'll get into that in our student solution a bit later on. Of that 37,000 clients, there is 750 universities or educations that trust us to collect funds from their foreign students all around the world. We also have a multi-channel offering to FIs, small and medium-size FIs, where we can actually plug them into our correspondent network of 130 currencies and 500 in-country bank accounts. Where we see an opportunity to solve a problem for a specific industry, we call that vertical specialization. This could be a large corporate having to make overseas accounts payable payments. It could be a payroll company requiring to pay their employees overseas.
It could be, as we'll get to in the next example, a growing part of our business, an exciting part of our business, which is education and universities having to collect funds from foreign students. This is a great market. There's 5 million international students at the moment, but it's growing all the time. We're well-placed in this market. We have established businesses in four main areas. We're in more than that, but the four main areas are the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. If student trends change and suddenly everybody wants to study in the U.K. because the pound's at 30-year lows, or they want to go to Canada because they've made the visa requirements easier, that's great for us because our business is balanced. We don't have concentration in just one single country.
Basically, the solution here is just collecting that money from any bank account. In some countries, it doesn't have to be a bank account. We have other ways of students can pay with us. We'll take those funds in, we'll convert them to the local currency of the university and send them to the university pretty much the next day with a full reconciliation of who's paid. A great solution for a university that doesn't want to go and collect funds from all around the world. We can also apply that use case to other industries. Medical is one that we're growing in at the moment. Similar problem for hospitals that are having patients come to visit them from overseas. They have to collect the funds, and we can essentially use the same platform to service those needs.
This is a part of our business that we're focused on, is growing at the moment. We'll take a look now at the next use case, which is B2B. B2B, this is a client of ours, which is Canadian Western Bank. This solution is plugging into our correspondent network of 130 odd currencies. CWB has chosen to white label. We do offer this as a full white label solution. They can actually plug in their clients, their business clients will see Canadian Western Bank, but when they make a payment, it'll be going through our rails. It'll be going through our bank account. We offer other ways to integrate.
We can do a standalone version of this product, GlobalPay for FI, or we can offer an API where a bank that wishes just to keep their front end can plug into our back end and get that same access. The benefit here to the bank is obviously they get instant access to a correspondent network. Benefit for us, we get an instant access to the bank's clients. This is a one-to-many solution, and it's very scalable, and it's a great proposition for both partners. We'll take a look at the final vertical use case. This is a client of ours in Brightwell. This is pension payroll. This one's actually payroll. There's an obvious need here. Payroll companies need to make payments overseas to employees of their clients. We offer a solution where they can plug into our network.
Now, the key here is the funds have to get there on time and in full value, and we can guarantee that. In this particular case, we've actually done an integration into Brightwell's ERP system, which allows them to pump out payroll every single month with the certainty our network gives them. This is another example of this one to many. We sign up Brightwell as a client, and every time Brightwell brings on more cruise liners and payrolls, we're there, and it's a very scalable proposition. That's the theme that runs through this vertical specialization. It's all about one to many. We get this university, we get the students of the university, then we get the payroll company, we get their clients, and when we get the credit unions or banks, we're able to serve their business clients.
It's very scalable and it's a big part of our future. We'll talk to the other part of our business, which is FX services or trade platform, as we call it. This is, I guess, the DNA. This is where the two entities that were combined 10 years ago came from. This is where they were based in this FX space. It's broken down into two elements for us today, which is Edge, which is a platform we developed recently, and it's built on modern technology, and I'll talk to that in a final use case in a second. The other part of this business is our people, it's our sales teams. It's the people that go out, the specialists, advise clients on their exposure to exchange risks, optimize their cash flow. This is a core asset and a core part of what we offer.
Where clients don't require that bespoke advice, the smaller businesses, we've built out this solution called Edge, which allows them to digitally self-serve. This particular platform is something we've been developing for a number of years, and we add functionality and allow clients to self-serve without the need to interact with us. I'll just take you through this use case on here, which is a person called Kate who's selling cheese in London and buys it from Paris. In order to pay the supplier, they search online, they come across the Edge proposition and sign up for an account. They can submit their compliance documentation online and be active without talking to anyone. It's all digital. They can set up a beneficiary and make a payment to that supplier using either ACH or Wire.
Once a part of that ecosystem, what we can then do is we can market to them and tell them about the benefits of WU EDGE, the other benefits. They can do invoice creation on WU EDGE. They can actually invite their supplier to set themselves up on WU EDGE, and if they do so, the next payment doesn't have to be a Wire ACH. It can be a book transfer, providing we're licensed in both of those countries. There's also benefits around sign-off and further functionality is being added all the time. We're adding the functionality and then we're putting the clients on there to digitally self-serve, which allows us then to further optimize our cost base, which you'll see that in our margins. Just to close out my section, this is what we're going to do.
The three things we're going to be focusing on as a business going forward is to continue to develop out WU EDGE. We're going to add the functionality. We're going to let clients self-serve. We're going to replace our legacy front ends and sunset them and put pretty much our client base over to WU EDGE, and we'll get the scalability and we'll get the cost savings. We'll invest in our people. They're key. We need to keep that high levels of customer satisfaction and service up, and we'll invest in the verticals which produce the scale and the consistent return we're looking for. We do these three things and we do them well, and we'll be able to produce consistent revenue growth going forward and further increase our EBITDA margins. Thank you very much, and now I'll pass you over to Rebecca for the final use case.
Good morning. These are exciting times at Western Union. I started my career here 16 years ago, and I've never been so convinced about the untapped growth potential, especially in light of our open platform strategy. At Western Union, we believe that globalization will never stop. We believe that societies will always continue to learn from one another, and that the borders that separate mankind will continue to diminish forever. For a company like Western Union, whose vision is to be the leader in cross-border, cross-currency, money movement and payments, this is good news. One example of this phenomena is the explosive growth of e-commerce, in particular, cross-border e-commerce. Forrester estimates that by the year 2022, a full 20% of all key e-commerce will be cross-border. Customers purchasing something online, not in their country, but from another country. However, there's an access problem today.
Less than half of the customers who would want to use a service like this have internationally enabled credit cards, which means it's hard for them to purchase online. Even customers who do have international cards many times have safety and security concerns with using their card online and have a strong preference to pay in person. We know that this is happening in the U.S., also all over the world, a continued preference for payments in person. Let me talk a little bit about what we've done in our collaboration with Amazon. Last year in October, we announced an alliance with Amazon that will allow customers to buy global and pay local through Western Union.
We've now launched this service in 19 cross-border markets. In very exciting news last week, we activated the service in the U.S. Let me talk about how this process works from a customer's point of view. In any of these 20 markets, a customer downloads the Amazon app or goes to amazon.com and adds items to cart. Customers like the selection, the quality, the pricing, and they add the items to the shopping cart. When they get to the checkout flow, previously only international cards or possibly bank payments would be accepted, but now customers will see an option for payment in person at a Western Union location. It's a product called Amazon PayCode . The customer selects that option and they check out of their cart.
They're given a pay code and a QR code, and they know exactly how much they need to bring to a Western Union agent location in local currency to make their payment. The customer arrives at the Western Union location, presents their QR code to be scanned, and in a fast and easy transaction, after paying with their cash and showing an ID, the customer's transaction is completed and Western Union notifies Amazon in real time that the payment has been collected and that the items can be processed and shipped. It's fast, easy and convenient for customers. Now, Amazon is called by some people, the most customer-centric organization in the world, and after having worked with them for a few years, I really believe that it's true. The customers that are buying online cross-border have high expectations for how this service should work.
They want to pay using a brand like Western Union that they trust. As you saw from Khalid's presentation, Western Union's brand has over 90% awareness across the world. Also from our research, we know that customers are more likely to use this service when paired with our brand than any other provider, because the trust that our brand represents. Customers also want to pay in a location nearby. They don't want to have to travel far. In the 19 cross-border markets where we've launched with Amazon, 95% of the country population is covered by a Western Union location within five kilometers. Customers also want local currency and fee transparency. In this model, the customer shows up, they know exactly how much they have to pay in local currency, and there are no additional fees or foreign exchange. It's very transparent and the customer really likes that.
Everything that we've built here in service of Amazon and their customers leverages our entire cross-border platform. Every single component of that cross-border platform that you've seen today is being leveraged here in a new and different way. The physical network, the real-time API technology connection with the partner, the compliance rules and licensing are very important. The settlement treasury and foreign exchange capabilities are being used, and our brand is very important. What's the most interesting to me about this is that Western Union, over the past several years, has taken our capabilities that we've spent $billions over the years for our own customers, and through our WU Way tools, which have enabled us to be process-oriented, customer-focused, and lean, we have opened up our platform to make these capabilities available to the market. It's a very new and different strategy for us.
In fact, in recent times, we've been getting a lot of demand from partners to collaborate in a similar way because as you can imagine, there's no other company that has the unique set of capabilities that we have to serve cross-border use cases. Industries like travel and tourism, insurance, government payments, pension, social media, wallets, Financial Institutions, et cetera. These are partners who have approached us looking for a collaboration leveraging our cross-border platform. For decades, Western Union has been evolving its partner-facing technology, that's not new. In response to the partner demand and also to facilitate speed to market for both our partners and our customers, we've introduced a developer portal where the developers of our prospective partners and current partners can access our open source APIs and accelerate a collaboration with us.
I want to remind everyone who's in Denver, if you haven't visited the booths outside, we've got a developer portal demo station as well as an Amazon demo station. With that, I'll turn it back over to Hikmet.
Thank you, Rebecca. That was great. She's really the executive behind our Amazon relationship. She's been working with our team very hard. It has been a journey, I have to say also. You have to understand, if you have locations in Indonesia, if you have locations in Colombia, they normally pay out. Now they have to collect funds for Amazon. We have the fundamentals, but at the same time, we have to invest and train these people. Now we see the success stories that Amazon wanted to launch the same product also in the U.S. Congratulations, Rebecca, and we are really looking forward on this use case to expand. As also Rebecca said that with this portal, yes, we do have partner demand. Many partners are calling us and would like to join our platform. The new partnership, we build an organization.
We could address this new partnership model. Our people on the field, our people constantly talking to those new partners. Many partners ranging from e-commerce players to telephone companies, to financial institutions, want to offer their customers a better service, want to open the world to their customers by using our platform. I would like to show you two recent examples, which are real examples, real use cases, which they recently partner with us. One is in Russia, one of the biggest consumer banks, the Sberbank, Russian Savings Bank. One is in Saudi Arabia Telecom Company. We have the case, Saudi Arabia Telecom Company outside. You can visit it. Both of them has been very successful. Both of them are new use cases. Both of them don't use Western Union brand, use their brand, but our platform. Both of them have been achieving a monthly 200,000 transaction.
We just started with them. In one case, the customers in Sberbank use their account, send money globally, and we drop money for them. We do the compliance. We do the settlement. We do the agent relationship worldwide. The other one is the customer loads money on the Saudi Arabia telecom wallet, and they use our system to send money, is it to Bangladesh, is it to Pakistan, is it to the Philippines? These both examples have been a recent success and both are not cannibalizing our business. We know that as you could see from Khalid, both are incremental transactions, respectively revenues for us. We are very excited about these use cases. This journey just started. These use cases also confirms that they are successful stories. Now, I think, Brad, we're going to take now a break.
You want to announce what's going on in break?
Yeah, I think we're tracking right to time. We'll take a 20-minute break for those in Denver. We'll be rejoining at 10:40. Again, exhibits back this way, and we'll finish up with Raj in Q&A when we return. Good. Yeah, thank you.
Please welcome Raj Agrawal, CFO.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the last couple of hours. I hope you can see the tremendous potential that this business has. Having seen our vision and our future growth strategies, I'd like to tell you a little bit more about what this means for us financially over the next few years, including our new financial targets around operating margins and EPS growth. Let me first start off with a strong foundation that we have to operate from. We have a stable and resilient business. We produce steady revenues, profits, and strong cash flows. We've also maintained a very healthy balance sheet over the years, and we maintain a solid investment-grade credit rating. We've also been very consistent in returning our excess free cash flow back to shareholders over the years. In the last three calendar years, that total was $2.3 billion.
In addition to the strong foundation, we also have stability in our revenue base and our major cost categories. As you can see, over the last three years, we've delivered a consistent margin, operating margin on an adjusted basis at approximately 20%. If you look at our largest business unit, our consumer business, which is well over 80% of our revenues, our major cost categories have also stabilized. Our retail commission rates have been trending downward. Our compliance costs and marketing expenses as a % of revenues have stayed relatively stable over this period. We also owned the Speedpay business during these years, which we've obviously now divested, but that had its own cost pressures associated with it, which we were also able to manage within the 20% adjusted margin.
As you look at the three-year targets that we've set, given the strong foundation that we operate from and the stability of our business and major cost categories, we are setting and establishing two new financial targets in the three-year period. Specifically, we're targeting 23% operating margins in 2022, which is going to be driven primarily by restructuring activities that we announced a few weeks ago and other efficiencies that I'll detail in a moment. This assumes a 2%-3% revenue growth rate, which is consistent with historical trends that we've had, and we've not assumed any significant contribution from the longer-term growth opportunities that were discussed this morning. We'll certainly give you more visibility to those new opportunities as they gain traction and update our outlook accordingly.
Given the 23% operating margin and the mid-teens tax rate that we've assumed over the next few years, given the current global tax environment, we do expect to target a low double-digit earnings per share growth rate over the next three years. This is based on this year's adjusted EPS level. It also assumes that we're going to be returning about $2.5 billion-$3 billion of capital to shareholders over this period through both share buybacks and dividends. About operating margins, again, our target is 23% in 2022, and that's going to be driven by three primary factors. First, the restructuring that we announced a few weeks ago will translate into $100 million of annual savings in 2021, half of that coming next year.
Other operating efficiencies that I'll talk more about will be driven by commission rate reductions, as well as third-party spend efficiencies, translating into an incremental $50 million by 2022. The revenue growth assumption of 2%-3%, which is consistent with recent trends, all drive the 23% operating margin in 2022, and we do expect to have margin expansion each of the next three years. A little bit about each of those three components. The restructuring that we announced a few weeks ago envisions us taking about $150 million charge between this year and next year, $100 million this year, $50 million next year, which is comprised primarily of severance-related expenses. Almost 75% of that is around severance and then other implementation costs that we have to put that program in place. All of this translates into $100 million of annual savings in 2021.
That also results in a 10% net headcount reduction at the company or about 1,000 roles. We do plan to reduce the headcount more than 1,000 roles. We're adding back positions in different geographies and different parts of our organization. We've also reorganized internally into our new operating model that you heard a little bit about this morning. We have a more efficient Consumer Money Transfer business, payments, the network and platform organization, more efficient corporate functions. We're also closing and/or downsizing a number of different sites around the world, including here in the U.S. We'll be leveraging key sites in the U.S. as well as abroad, including our operating centers in Lithuania, Costa Rica, and our new technology hub that reopened in Pune, India a couple of years ago.
As a part of this, we're also flattening the organization as we take out a number of different senior roles around the company to speed decision-making and optimize our processes internally. This will all result in about $100 million of annual savings in 2021, with $50 million of that savings coming next year in 2020. In addition to the restructuring activities, we've also targeted significant additional savings for the company through a number of other areas, primarily through commission rate reductions and third-party spending. We believe that this will allow us to invest significantly back into the organization and into cross-border payment opportunities that you heard about this morning, as well as take additional dollars to the bottom line. Specifically, we're targeting $50 million of additional savings that we're going to take to our operating profit line that will drive the additional margin expansion by 2022.
Commissions, as you may know, is our largest cost item in the company at $1.9 billion last year. We've done a pretty good job, as you've seen, of reducing commission rates over the last several years. We believe that with our negotiation strategies and the realignment of our distribution globally, as you heard earlier, that we will drive significant additional savings in this line item. In addition, we're reevaluating all of our third-party spending. All of the services that we acquire outside the company, we're reevaluating that and will leverage our in-house technology centers further. We'll optimize spending in the marketing and real estate area, as well as other areas. We're also launching spending control towers inside the company that will help to manage and control the spending throughout the company on an ongoing basis.
We're also doing in-depth category reviews of the major spend items in the company. All of these activities should give us significant additional savings that we plan to reinvest in the business to drive all the opportunities you heard about this morning, as well as take an additional $50 million to our operating profit line. All of that is going to give us about $150 million of annual savings by 2022, the restructuring and then these additional opportunities. Now, in terms of revenue growth, we've assumed a 2%-3% revenue growth rate, which is consistent with historical trends. This is going to be driven by a few different factors. The consumer business we expect to grow in the 2%-3% range over the next few years, driven primarily by our digital business.
Our digital business includes westernunion.com and other digital partnerships that we may have in the future. We do believe that this business can continue to grow in the 20% range over the next several years. We also have assumed a relatively stable global pricing environment in the next few years. We also believe there's additional opportunity to maximize the customer lifetime value with the dynamic pricing opportunities that were spoken about earlier. That gives us confidence that the retail business will be a very stable business as we move forward. We expect that to be flat to up slightly over the next few years. We've also assumed that the business solutions business unit will continue to grow in the mid-single digit range the next several years as we continue to drive growth and expansion in that part of the business.
Beyond the 2%-3%, we're still targeting additional growth opportunities with opening up our cross-border platform to marketplaces, to FIs, and to mass payment opportunities, and we believe there's further opportunity for growth, but we have not assumed any of these additional opportunities in the 2%-3% and are not dependent on these additional opportunities to get to our margin and EPS goals. In terms of capital allocation, we've been very shareholder-friendly the last several years, and we expect to continue that trend as we move forward. This year, we're generating about $950 million in operating cash flow on an adjusted basis. We continue to target an investment-grade credit rating, and within that framework, our capital priorities have not changed.
We're going to continue to reinvest in the business to drive organic growth and expansion. We expect to spend between 3% and 5% of our revenues on capital expenditures to drive that growth. Our dividend level today is at $0.80 per share. We spend more than $300 million a year in giving that back to shareholders. We expect to continue to raise the dividend as the business performs over the next few years. We're going to continue to be disciplined on the M&A side. We have continued to look at M&A opportunities. They have to fit strongly within our cross-border payments strategy, and they have to be at the right financial return for us to consider those. Repurchases, we'll use the remaining cash flows that we have, and essentially, returning most of our free cash flow back to shareholders in that regard.
We do have a strong track record of returning most of our free cash flow back to shareholders. Since we have not done a large acquisition in the last several years, we've essentially returned the majority of our excess free cash flows to shareholders over the years. This year is no exception. We plan to return approximately $900 million between both buybacks and dividends over this year, and that $900 million includes some contribution from the Speedpay business that we sold earlier this year. As we look at the next few years, our operating cash flow picture is very strong. We expect to generate more than $3 billion of operating cash flow over the next three years, and we do expect to improve the operating cash flow each of the next three years as we implement our various programs.
We do anticipate increasing our dividend level over the next few years in line with our business performance. We anticipate returning about $2.5 billion-$3 billion back to shareholders through both buybacks and dividends over the same period. As we look at the next three years, just to summarize, we continue to expect a very stable and resilient business, generating steady revenues and cash flows. We expect to enhance the overall profile of the business as we drive to 23% operating margins in 2022, and a low double-digit earnings per share growth rate over that same period. We've also assumed a 2%-3% revenue growth rate to achieve these financial targets. We continue to target longer-term growth opportunities that can drive further growth and expansion in the company.
That is our financial summary and financial outlook for the next three years, and I'm happy to take questions in just a few moments, but I'll hand it over to Hikmet. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Raj. We said in our opening video, we are ready. We are ready. Let me recap the day before we go to the Q&A session. I'm very excited about our future. I know my team is very excited about our future. We are excited about our strong market position, and we are excited that we have a solid strategy for growth for our core business. We are also committed for operating margin improvement and a strong capital return to our investors. We also have a great plan to unleash and to drive the incremental revenue opportunities, which are not included in our 2%-3% revenue assumptions, which we just mentioned earlier. This is also an upside opportunity for us with our new strategy, opening our platform to new use cases.
We are very proud also to deliver our plans in a responsible and transparent way. Many of you investors are interested on our ESG reports. We have printed reports outside on our ESG reports or download it from our webpage. As you know, ESG report, it's not only reporting. Our strategy, serving customers, serving and solving and addressing the most challenging issues of the world sits in our hearts. We are addressing these issues with our business model with a responsible and transparent way. This is, believe me, ladies and gentlemen, deeply embedded in my management team. As you can see here, and as you can hear from my accent and from other accents, we have a very diverse global team with a great leadership, diversity with both gender and ethnic diversity, and it's a global workforce.
It actually reflects our customer needs, our ethnic and global customer needs. I would like to take a moment and also thank my team to working so hard to work on this investor day. Everyone who involved in this investor day, thank you preparing a great investor day and presenting our future to our investors and analysts. I would like to also thank my board, which I'm fortunate position that I have a fantastic board. We are very proud by guided and experienced diverse board. They have the highest levels of corporate governance and thus protects shareholders value. I want to express special thanks to Jeff Joerres . Could you stand up, Jeff? Our chairman who is here today. Jeff, thank you for your support and guidance. Jeff will also join us for lunch when we have afterwards lunch.
Before we go to Q&A, again, we are here to win. Thank you for taking your time to listening to the presentation. I think the next session is we have about 40 minutes for Q&A session. Thank you very much. Thank you for the presentations.
Ladies and gentlemen, please note that for today's Q&A session, all questions will be answered in the order that they are received. If you have a question, please raise your hand and an attendant will be with you shortly.
Hi. It's Bryan Keane over here, Deutsche Bank. Just want to ask about commissions, and negotiating lower commissions. Do you expect to get some pushback in that? What's the difference between doing that today versus years ago? That's always been a big item. Lastly, is there more room to go on commissions just past this year, thinking about the model leverage going forward, if you get to 23% operating margins, are we going back down to 20% or are we actually going up from there? Thanks.
I'll start if you like.
Yeah.
Great question, Bryan. Thank you. I think commissions, as you know, has two factors. First of all, our business model has changed. In the past, everything was owned by the agents. Know your customer, the marketing, point of sale upgrade, everything done by the agents. We did pay them commissions to really solve this issue, this cost also. As the business model has changed, we take many of the operational functions. We believe also that the commission rates should go down. The commission rates over the years have been decreasing, and we believe that we have a very great plan to bring them even more down. Negotiations are something not new to us. We've been negotiating with agents all the time.
On the send side, most of the agents like our brands have been, I think top 40 agents have been with us exclusive for the last 17, 18 years.
20-plus years.
20-plus years. They've been loyal to us. On the receive side, it's more diverse locations. We drop money wherever if possible. The other thing is also the mix. More and more transactions are going to an account. We see that. Account payout transactions, commissions are much lower than on a retail payout location. I think that over time, that will really go down. We have a commitment and a good plan on that. We already started to implement this plan, and it will be going down. On the second part of the question on the margin, I feel very confident the 23%. I feel also very confident that this is long-term. I believe that our business model is unique, our business model is efficient. Our business model using more technology really gives us the chance to keep the margins for a longer time.
Hi, this is Vasundhara Govil from KBW. Quick question on, you've highlighted a lot of new initiatives today around dynamic pricing, around opening up the platform to new partners. I know it's not included in your 2%-3% revenue guide, but how should we think about potential revenue contribution from these, if these are successful? The follow-up I had was, as you sign these partnerships with the likes of Amazon or stc, what is the typical sort of sales cycle to sign one of these large partners? Thank you.
You want to jump on in?
Why don't you try, and I jump in this time?
Well, look, we wanted to give confidence to everyone that we need 2%-3% revenue growth to get to our operating margin and EPS goals. That's relatively consistent with what we've achieved the last few years. So we really don't have much contribution as we mentioned earlier. Each point of revenue growth for us is in the $50 million-$60 million range, right? That's the kind of revenue lift we need to get a point of growth. Absolutely, we're in it to drive further growth. We have had higher growth in past years, and we do believe that some of these things can add incremental growth. We have specifically not communicated or committed to anything beyond the 2%-3% because we really want to see how some of these play out.
Amazon partnership is relatively new this year, and it's a very different use case than what we've had before. It's not a remittance use case, so there are lots of different opportunities. You saw the stc and Sberbank examples earlier. That's beyond our expectations of how those are performing. I don't think they've fully ramped up yet. Some of these things could be further contributors to us. We just haven't included it yet in our 2 or 3% revenue level.
Where is the second question?
The sales cycle. On the sales cycle.
I can jump in if you like to.
Yeah. Please go ahead.
Well, it depends really on the partner. As Rebecca mentioned, in Amazon, it didn't start to happen in a day. We built groups, we worked hard, about months. We tested again, we went back, started again, because Amazon is very much focused on customer experience, and we wanted to get it right. In stc was faster because they want to go to market fast because they just launched a new wallet. They wanted to have a partner. In Sberbank, it took three years since my visit in Moscow until we launched that, because it's a banking, it's a more bigger bank, it's a savings bank. It really depends on the partner. In the map, all the requests for additional revenues are there. We are constantly talking. We have a team. We are negotiating with that.
Signing an agreement is probably faster than implementing because the APIs, their IT program has to be matched with ours. The good thing is, though, our team has now open API possibility. It's not like we are serving only our agent network. We are serving now really as a payment provider, multi customers. That helps us. We are being very agile, but the other side has to work also.
Okay.
Hi, Rayna Kumar from Evercore ISI. I have two questions, one for Hikmet and one for Raj. Hikmet, you recently announced a new partnership with Visa where you will leverage the Visa Direct platform. Can you talk a little bit about the opportunity in the push-to-card space and the TAM associated with it? Raj, you mentioned your medium-term guide assumed stable pricing environment. In the case you don't have that stable pricing, how can you offset that to still get to the 2%-3% revenue growth in the medium term?
Well, jump in, Jasu, when I say something wrong. Visa partnership, we are extremely excited about that. It's Visa Direct, which basically it's the same like opening an account direct, dropping money really on a Visa Direct customer. They have a 16-digit numbers as in a Visa. You send money to the Visa Direct, they connect with the banks, issuing bank the transfer. We didn't launch it yet. We announced it. We are working with that. It gives another opportunity for us to open our money drop-up environment. It shows also corporations like Visa want to work with us because we have the platform capabilities which can connect with Visa.
On your question around pricing, just look at the last few years. It's been quite stable, the pricing environment, and we continue to see the same thing on a go-forward basis. We're always moving pricing up and down in our 20,000 corridors or country pairs, and we expect we're going to continue to do that. Sometimes pricing is going to be up, sometimes it's going to be down in any given quarter. If you really add onto it the optimization of the lifetime value of the customer that Khalid spoke about earlier, the dynamic pricing, that's something we don't do in an automated way today. If you really think about the 20,000 corridors we have from a country pair standpoint, and then you add in a number of other factors, and you throw it into a machine, it really could be powerful for us.
We believe there's some additional opportunity there, and that's why we really believe that the consumer business can deliver the 2% to 3% revenue growth overall, and we'll have a stable retail business in that whole picture.
Great. This is James Faucette from Morgan Stanley. I wanted to ask about the expanded capabilities of the platform that you're pursuing, and then versus the margin expansion. I guess I'm wondering if you wouldn't have an opportunity to drive more incremental revenue faster, especially as you add capabilities if you weren't forecasting or driving so much margin expansion. I'm wondering how you're thinking about timing and the right time to increase investment to drive the revenue growth. My second question kind of ties in with that, is that in your capital return plan to emphasize dividends and buybacks, and that makes sense. One of the things that we see in a lot of other industries when there's lots of private investment like there is in this space right now, is that tends to lead to lots of M&A activity and M&A opportunities.
How are you thinking about and looking at those as priorities as well?
I'll take the first one.
Yeah, go ahead.
On the margin expansion, James, thank you for the question. We really believe that we can achieve that from our core business, core platform. Really focus on that. We really believe also we still have room, we planned room to have the expansion activities to go after new revenue opportunities. It doesn't mean that we are not going to go, we're going to slow the new revenue opportunities because we're going to expand the margin. We really focus on the growth. We are very dedicated. You saw some use cases where we are doing it, our existing capabilities allows us to go after the new growth opportunities without sacrificing on margin. I really believe that. That's unique. The reason for that is maybe, James, if you go back for many years, until 2016, we were really firefighting. We had some issues on the core business.
Beginning of 2017, we feel much more comfortable that we can go to the market. Now we were kind of a defense. Now we feel much more we can play offense. We can go for revenue opportunities because our platform has been more agile, because we can find more savings there and invest also in the growth opportunities.
From a capital standpoint, I showed the capital priorities we have. We really do look at things in that order in terms of how we use our cash. M&A activities comes before share buyback. To the extent that we do any material M&A, we would maybe reduce share buyback. You get some flexibility when you're doing M&A from the credit rating agencies if we stay in that framework. I would just say that we have not done a large acquisition in many years. That doesn't mean that we haven't continued to look at opportunities, right? Something really has to fit within our strategy. It has to really accelerate what we're doing already. The things that we have in our company already, the platform and the capabilities, they're difficult to actually replicate and to buy something that actually adds to it.
That's why we've returned most of our free cash flow through the buybacks and dividends, obviously. We're certainly going to balance those two things if the right thing presents itself, and it should be additive to our strategy.
Hi, guys. It's Darrin Peller from Wolfe. Thanks. I just want to understand, if you can, a little bit more granular detail. If you take the 1,000 people that you say you're cutting out, what were they actually doing for your business for the past three, four years that's not really necessary going forward? If we take it a step forward, you've talked about that with a couple of points of growth on the revenue side, it was not historically enough to get operating leverage. Now it seems like you're saying that there's enough to actually cut costs, restructure, and then potentially have long-term margin expansion, even beyond these initial engineerings. It sounds like you're just being more efficient. Can you just walk through that, please?
Yeah. We are taking out 1,000 roles. I would say it really started a few years ago, Darren, with the WU Way programs that we initially started. We have been laying the foundation with lean management operating principles all around the world, and it really has allowed us to do the things that we talked about a few weeks ago. It's more heavily weighted towards senior level type roles, and so we're taking out layers of management and really streamlining the decision-making process. We're also putting things in our shared services center, so we're moving functions around the world. That is translating into significant savings, and that's why with a 2%-3% growth, the $150 million of savings that we're driving for really does allow us to take the margins to a much higher level.
We're saving more than the $150 million, but we're not letting all of that fall to the bottom line. If you want to add to that.
Let me just add on that. Darren, it is important when you run the company like that, which company all over the global to change a culture. The cultural change started really with our Wu Wei lean management, kind of a Six Sigma culture. It started actually with bottom up. We trained 8,000 people. They put us under pressure, say that this business could be run differently. They found in their projects some savings. We took the savings, really reinvested in the business. A year ago, we said, "Okay, if we can do that there, we could do also company process, total process, optimize them." That's where we said that, okay, we could optimize or restructure our organization. For instance, we just implemented our innovation center in Pune, in India. We built it there. Like Muscat has their also one in Pune.
We had big engineers also in San Francisco. Now we have kind of executive in San Francisco, but we can find really optimization in Pune. That's one example of really saving the cost. I believe that it's going to not sacrifice anything on our business. It's going to be more efficient. We are going to use more artificial intelligence. We're going to use more technology. The dynamic pricing, which what Khalid presented, is all built on technology, machine learning. The things what Jacqueline presented on the compliance programs, it's all about technology. I think that shift happened that allowed us to find the savings and that allowed us to really committing to the investors that we could drop it to the bottom line.
Ashwin.
Ashwin Shirvaikar from Citi. First of all, thank you for the presentation. Very useful.
Thank you.
Thank you for putting your team.
Thank you, Ashwin.
A two-part question. The first is, it seems to me you guys are opening up more. There's more talk of white label and more talk about partners. How does the economics change? Can you talk about, say, for example you're working with Amazon or Kroger, how does the revenue share model look like? Any color would be useful. Then the second thing, since you provided a three-year timeframe, and we do get questions from investors about cyclicality of the business. I know, Hikmet, you mentioned resilience a few times, but can you remind us sort of how should we expect the different pieces? Say, for example, B2B, you didn't have the last cycle. What happened in the last cycle in C2C, and how might the B2B business respond?
Sure. I'll take the first.
Okay.
No, go ahead.
No.
No, go ahead please.
No, go ahead.
You jumped in.
On the first example with white label partnerships, they're very profitable, first of all. I'll give you the STC example, because we're really a processor for them, for their transactions. They are doing the heavy lifting in terms of acquiring customers. In that example, we don't have the customer acquisition costs that we would typically have for a digital kind of transaction. That's a big opportunity for us. Now, accordingly, they're paying us a lower fee or revenue per transaction than we might otherwise get because we have less costs in the process. That's why it can still be a very profitable business for us. We really look at that as being largely an incremental opportunity for us, something we're not capturing today.
That's why we really think that along with our branded offerings, in combination, are going to be our future as we grow the business.
On the resilience or no surprises question, Hikmet, how you can convince us that you want to continue to operate like that, I think it's a great question. The last few years, as you know, the business has been very stable, actually. We were growing, especially in the digital area, we were growing very strong. If you look at that, our digital business, now approximately $600 million. It's still growing by 20%. It's amazing. I don't know any competitors can do that from that scale. I believe there's still room to grow because we are only in a few countries, geographically expansion, customer focus. It's really growth opportunities. On the pricing environment, that has been stable also, the environment.
Even our largest corridor, 5% of our revenue has been stable also, and we've been really managing the pricing very well, as you know, and we are responding the environment. The beauty of our business is also our pricing depends on the customer behavior, sometimes on FX, sometimes on fee, sometimes on both. We really adapt that. The customers are responding. We are adding new customers. Our customer's profile is growing also. Our transactions are growing. I feel quite comfortable on the core business that we're going to continue to execute. On the B2B, our refocus on the B2B after we solved all this, not all this, you never solve forever the issues, but we feel much more comfortable controlling and owning the processes. I believe that also you saw the vertical environment is very promising for us.
The competition currently is suffering on the student pays for instance, because given the political environment, there are less students in the U.S. from China. The Chinese students are going now to England or Australia or New Zealand, and we are there. Our revenues are compensating that within the corridor. B2B is very important for us. We are not dependent only on the effects volatility there. Really real business, real transactions. I feel comfortable there.
Great. Thanks. It's Tien-tsin Huang from J.P. Morgan. Thanks for the presentation as well. I think opening up the platform makes a lot of sense. You went through some good logic there. I'm curious about the knock-on effects of opening up the platform because you're ceding pricing and giving control on pricing to third parties and to partners. What are the ripple effects or the knock-on effects of doing that, Hikmet? Could it put pressure on the network itself? For example, the agents on the physical side, as they see prices coming in perhaps at a lower level, could that put pressure in other places of the business? How are you balancing that? Actually, I have a follow-up as well, if that's okay.
It's a short question, but probably long answer. You are basically also asking is the new business cannibalizing your existing business and what the agent reaction, what the ecosystem reaction on your existing business is. First of all, also Ashwin's question and your question. Sberbank example. We are really a processor for Sberbank. We set a transaction price per transaction, and we really adapt the processing fees with Sberbank. Secondly, Sberbank and Amazon and stc are incremental. They've been not using Western Union in the past. Sberbank was doing transaction from Russia to Uzbekistan via correspondent banking. Took two days or three days with different FX rates, and it was more expensive than happening now. The Sberbank customer doesn't even know now we are behind that. Suddenly, the transactions are moving faster. That is offered by us as a fee. It's really not cannibalization.
On the core business, I believe that our customers like us. We are acquiring more customers, and we are really getting there without cannibalization. The new business model is really working on that also. Look, Tien-tsin, if we don't do that business with Sberbank, somebody else will do it. If we don't do that business with stc, somebody else will do it. I rather do it, and I add incremental revenue and hope that in future I can give even guidance what the revenue will be. It's still the start, and we are very excited about that.
That makes sense. Just thinking about the unit economics that Ashwin asked about, maybe asking it differently, if we were to benchmark what you're doing for an Amazon or a Sberbank or the Saudi telco firm, how should we benchmark that? Because you're using compliance as an asset. You're talking about your network as an asset. You're trying to monetize that here, which makes sense as a platform. Is this more like a merchant acquiring kind of benchmark? Is it more of a network economic? Is it all of the above? Just trying to better understand how you want to-
Well.
properly monetize what you have.
It's basically really builder acquisition for cross-border payments. You're acquiring, on the Amazon, it's really C2B. You open your network for a business. On the banks, it's really accessing to the financial services as a platform. The uniqueness, though, that was I told the story, it took me a while to tell the story, is that no company than us has this compliance technology settlement capability like we do. If you compare it with other payments institutions, they do only a part of it. I'm going to the market, say that this is so complex, moving money from Vietnam to Japan. Look, here's the package. You don't have to buy this from different providers. Here's the package. I can collect and drop money for you the best way. That's the biggest difference, probably, we are doing against other payment provider for cross-border.
It is easier in domestic when it comes in the one area to drop money. Real-time payments is much easier domestic-wise or in a currency like in the Euro area. When it comes to cross-currency, it gets really complex.
Thanks. It's Jamie Friedman from Susquehanna. Jackie did an incredible job with the compliance. Thank you. I just wanted to ask, though, about the regulatory. The black swan events, from a shareholder's perspective, have come from the Attorney General's act, the Orlandi Valuta. It's very hard for us in our seat to predict that. How would you characterize the regulatory heat right now? Are there any corridors that are standing out, or is it all quiet on the Western front? Thanks.
Do you want me to take it?
Well, yeah, start.
All right. There's heat all around the world, so it always exists. I would say that we really have invested a lot in our compliance programs and other capabilities since 2012. Most of the issues that we've had to pay some penalties for were pre-2012. We really are in a much better position today. You can never predict exactly what regulators will say or do, but we really have very strong talent in the organization around the regulatory relationships as well as the compliance capabilities. We've invested so much, as you've seen from Jacqueline's presentation. I think we're in a much better spot than we were a few years ago.
There's no certainty around other regulators and how they may respond, but we have a much better spot today than we did a few years ago in terms of the capabilities that we have and things that we've built.
Listen, we learned and upgrade our team. We are amazing team here, with Jacqueline, with Caroline, and their team is unbelievable. We have local experts. We are constantly talking to the regulators, and we are learning from them, and we are giving also feedback. I think that the environment is ever-changing. It will ever-changing. I feel much more comfortable than to 2012, 2013, or 2014. The regulatory environment is also unique. As I mentioned earlier, startups or some projects, cryptocurrency projects, underestimate the environment. We have the expertise. We are learning. We are constantly in contact with regulatory. That's gone. It is the business. Moving money is good. At the same time, it's a risky business. You have to be top of it.
Kartik.
Sure. Thanks. Kartik Mehta from Northcoast Research. Raj, in your presentation, you talked about the C2C business growing by 2%-3%. Would you compare that to what you think the industry's growing? If it's lower, why is Western Union growing lower? Just on the agent commission, I'd be interested, when you're talking about driving down agent commission, is that the result of more transactions going to account and wallet? Is that why it's going to be driven down? Is it Western Union actually negotiating a lower rate with its agents? If you're negotiating a lower rate, isn't that cause alarm, or are you worried that competitors might come in and take that agent away?
On the first one, the consumer business growth, we have a very large business. If you look at, you have to separate the retail from the digital business. The digital business, which is wu.com, plus other digital providers that we may have relationships with, we still believe that's going to grow at 20%. We really do believe that the majority of the growth in the overall remittance market will come from the digital part of the market. We have a very strong position there. As you have seen from some of the charts today, we have also a large share of the cash-based market, right? We have a much larger business than some of the other providers, and it's really a matter of scale of where you are there. In terms of commissions, some of it is related to mix, and that's.
Maybe JC wants to answer that question.
Oh, yeah. JC, yeah, please come on up here and help me out here. Come on.
I was just saying hi, but it seems I need to answer the question. Your question is, what are we going to do and how commissions are going to go down. Actually, it's both things that you have said. It's direct negotiation with current agents that we have in our network, and the same time, it's a channel mix shift where you're going to be able to pay out the money in different places. You asked as well another question saying, are you concerned that competition, what are they going to do? Our first objective is on the receive side.
When you negotiate with agents on the receive side, competition can be there in terms of exclusivity, semi-exclusive, non-exclusive, but you need to understand one thing, is that on the send side, whenever that transaction has been put in the pipeline, it's going to get paid on the receive side. Competition or not, if you put it on the send side in the pipeline, it's going to get paid out. I'll go back.
Thanks, JC. I think any more questions? Derek? We'll get you a microphone. Just one second. Just a follow-up question. Hikmet, you mentioned a moment ago some of the efforts that have been undertaken in crypto, et cetera. You yourselves have announced a partnership in the past with Ripple. Can you just talk about what you have seen from an innovation standpoint there, and what may be useful versus what you think is probably more hype than anything?
When we talk about crypto, I think we have to differentiate about two use cases, one crypto as fiat currency, Bitcoin, and one crypto mechanism as a settlement currency with the blockchain support. Crypto as a fiat currency is hard to implement. I believe that regulatory environment will be very much looking over that. None of the central banks ever would like to give a control away from the monetary policies to a third party. I think the central banks want to be involved on the creating a cryptocurrencies, and there are some noise from some central banks that they want to issue their own cryptocurrency, which is basically dollar or pound or whatever that is. It's only a project. It has not been seen as a real implementation. There are 7 billion people worldwide. Not only 10,000 people can use this cryptocurrency.
Making that use case in the last mile of Manila or last mile of Ivory Coast, as a cryptocurrency will be hard. There are not even point-of-sale systems and other payments institutions. I think that's a longer project, we having a fiat currency as a cryptocurrency. On the other side, on the settlement wise, as you know, we've been investigating and looking around if we can do our settlement functions even in a much better way, faster way, cheaper way. Look, nobody can beat our settlement capability. Doing settlement in seconds in 130 currencies, moving $300 billion worldwide. We have not found a settlement currency on a base on a cryptocurrency, implementing in our system saying that we will find the cost efficiency. Saying that, we are investing as looking on the innovative part.
Maybe why don't you say, Brad, you are running this part. Why don't you jump in here?
Yeah. No, I think just to back up Hikmet's point, we have experimented. We keep an open mind. From when I wear my treasury hat, we're very open-minded about finding, particularly those partners who want to look at enabling industry players. I think the question fundamentally comes down to these issues, which is when you're operating at scale, you have a very efficient system. We've been open book with many players in the industry to understand, is there some further efficiency, either speed or quality or cost? We haven't found it yet, but we do keep an open mind. We continue to monitor. I think at some level, it also becomes a question of, there are intermediaries in those systems as well, and I think people forget that.
The idea that there are costs to process transactions, whether if it involves an exchange or if there are other intermediaries involved. I think you do have to separate it, and you have to understand sort of where your starting point is. That said, I think that the world is changing, and I think a number of us are looking at, either from a partnership perspective, from a commercial perspective, or from a treasury cap, how can we utilize this, keeping an open mind and working with partners, being involved in the conversation.
Hey, just a couple of quick follow-ups. On the portfolio of assets, when you look at what you actually have, you have the domestic business. I didn't hear a lot about that today. It's been declining, obviously, given competitive pressures, I think. Should we just assume that the DMT business keeps declining at a similar, I guess, double-digit rate for the foreseeable future embedded in your 2%-3% outlook? Just in terms of the portfolio, I thought there was some discussion at least a year ago about maybe the Travelex and Custom House businesses being potentially restructured and strategically sold. I'm not sure if that's changed now. It sounds like it's a core part of your strategy going forward now. Speedpay obviously was moved out. Just what are your thoughts on the assets, on those assets now?
Let me talk about the first one, then I'll give you the-
Okay
unless you want the first one. On the domestic money transfer business, first of all, the only place where it's sizable in nature is here in the U.S., so it really is a U.S. domestic issue. We have not assumed any change in trends in the domestic business. Last year, domestic in the U.S. was about 7% of our total revenues, and I expect it's going to be less than that this year. The digital part of domestic is also declining, so we've not assumed any change in trends there. That's part of our overall outlook that we've given you, that that business is likely to decline.
It's not going to go to zero ever, because there's always a need to have retail payout of money and to use the domestic business, but it's probably going to be smaller than it is today in that regard.
Darren, on the B2B business, as you look at our B2B business is definitely core of what we are doing, moving money cross-border, cross-currency between two currencies. The verticals examples you saw today, it's impressive, and we're going to build on that. We're going to continue to do that. Now our focus is there because we can do it now, right? We are looking for synergies, how we can put everything in one platform on a cloud. As I mentioned already, we started with our cloud strategy and finding efficiencies. Saying that, we will always look at opportunities to respond to the shareholder value. We are very much focused to executing, and I think the team is doing a great job, and we are very much focused to find the right synergies and putting everything on a platform to drive this business in a much efficient way.
As Andrew mentioned, the EBITDA margins in the B2B business will increase.
Okay. I think we're-
Yeah
no more questions. Brad, back to you.
Yeah. Great. Thanks for joining us. Those on the webcast, also, thanks for joining us.