MoneyGram Teams With LuLu Money To Power Asia-Pacific Transactions

Cross-border peer-to-peer (P2P) payments firm MoneyGram has teamed up with foreign exchange and global money transfer company LuLu Money, MoneyGram announced on Tuesday (Jan. 21).

The Philippines-headquartered LuLu Money will use MoneyGram’s API-driven platform to interface with leading consumer-centric capabilities and advance its global network.

Adeeb Ahamed, managing director of LuLu Financial Group, which is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, said the collaboration with MoneyGram “will revolutionize” how remittances are handled in the Asia-Pacific region, “changing the way people approach digital transactions.”

He added that the firm sees this as marking “a new era for digital money transfers and remittances” in the Asia-Pacific region and the world.

The strategic partnership widens MoneyGram’s and LuLu Money’s presence in the Asia-Pacific region and Oman. MoneyGram money transfers will be accessible via LuLu Money’s system branches, liaison offices and more than 50,000 agents.

Remittance disbursements to East Asia and the Pacific account for $149 billion and are anticipated to go up in the future, per MoneyGram’s statement. A recent report from the United Nations indicates that tech advances in the remittance marketplace “could help enable financial inclusion for hundreds of millions of people in the Asia-Pacific region.”

At the signing ceremony, Alex Holmes, chairman and chief executive officer of MoneyGram, said that “LuLu Money has made a major push to digitize its money transfer business through this partnership. MoneyGram looks forward to working with them to create new, innovative products and services that extend our digital reach and bring financial inclusion to customers throughout the Asia-Pacific market.”

Launched in 2009, Lulu Money has five million users processing 1.1 million transactions annually. MoneyGram has a presence in more than 200 countries and territories; over 65 countries are digitally enabled.

In November, payments company Ripple invested $50 million in MoneyGram, acquiring almost 10 percent of MoneyGram’s common stock. MoneyGram said the capital would be earmarked to develop and expand its On-Demand Liquidity payment system, which uses XRP cryptocurrency. MoneyGram has been using XRP for transactions in several countries around the world.