Our outlook does not include any impact from our patent infringement lawsuit against MoneyGram. As you may be aware, a jury recently awarded Western Union $16.5 million in damages from MoneyGram for infringing on our patented money transfer by phone service. And since the verdict is still being contested by MoneyGram, we have not included the $16.5 million dollar award in our outlook.
I will now turn the call back over to Christina for an update on our growth initiatives. Christina?
Christina A. Gold
Thank you, Scott. Our priority growth initiatives stem from one central strategy, growing a profitable portfolio of complimentary businesses, which extends our leadership position in moving money around the world quickly and in a compliant manner. These five key initiatives include banking, the payment services directive in Europe, business-to-business cross border payments, prepaid and mobile.
Our banking strategy is gaining momentum. The large bank relationships that are currently operation are performing well and early experiences indicate they are bringing new customers to Western Union. In fact, in the first year of these relationships over half of the transactions involve customers who had not used Western Union during the prior 12 months.
Banks which were nearly non-existent in our U.S. and Canadian network a year ago now represent over 10% of our location distribution in those countries and the pipeline is encouraging.
U.S. Bank is operational. We are preparing to launch Fifth Third locations and Fidelity National Information Services has begun signing relationships with small and medium sized financial institutions.
In the European union, the payment services directive is effective on November the 1st and we received approval for our license from the U.K. regulatory authorities. We have integrated the sales force and operational infrastructure acquired through FEXCO and we are utilizing this platform to grow in Europe.
Through PSD, we expect to attract additional customers while expanding the classes of trade that offer money transfer services in countries that previously limited our agents to banks and post offices. We recently signed three letters of agreement with Ortel, PayUp and Lagardère providing the potential for 15,000 additional retail locations throughout Europe.
In the global business payment segment, we completed our Custom House acquisition on September 1st. Custom House offers small and medium-sized businesses exceptional customer service, reliability and competitive pricing when making cross border business payments. We estimate this market for SME''s generates global revenue comparable to or larger than the consume-to-consumer money transfer market.
With a proven track record of success, we are glad to have the Custom House team on board as we focus on integrating and expanding this scalable opportunity. We are investing now in order to more deeply penetrate existing markets, adding sales offices and staff in the United States, Canada, the U.K. and Australia. We are also enhancing our website capabilities and preparing to open offices in new markets.
Custom House offers exciting opportunities across a wide range of geographies and we are well on our way to establishing the platform for growth.
In prepaid, our testing over the course of the past few months has provided valuable information for us to expand our offerings. We currently have two reloadable prepaid programs in the market.
First, our MoneyWise Visa prepaid card provides a strong value proposition to consumers particularly the under-banked. This card enables consumers to add money conveniently, including the ability to load a Western Union money transfer directly onto the card.
Our new prepaid Visa Gold card has all of the same great benefits of the MoneyWise program and it integrates our industry leading Gold Card rewards. We continue to pilot both programs and are expanding them through a variety of marketing efforts, including direct mail, on-line, e-mail and in retail operations.
Cash-to-cash money transfer remains a dominant preference among the consumers moving money today. However, mobile is emerging as a complimentary channel for money transfer and there is a long-term opportunity in transforming mobile phones into virtual Western Union locations.
The potential of mobile money was recently described in an economist''s article which highlighted the success of Safaricom M-PESA. This rapidly growing offering provides inter-country mobile money transfer within Kenya. This is a somewhat unique situation where there is a leading network operator and mobile wallets have been widely adopted. We are actively participating in the Kenya opportunity through cross border mobile money transfer.
We have expanded our service with Vodafone and sister company Safaricom. We now have more than 40 Western Union locations in the U.K., where consumers can send money directly to the phones of more than six million Safaricom subscribers with M-PESA wallets. We are targeting all the major Kenya send locations in the U.K. and by year end we expect to have 80% or 2,000 of these key locations enabled for mobile transfer.
The Philippines is another one of the few countries currently equipped with mobile wallets. Through partnerships with Smart and Globe, we have active pilots for mobile transfers to that country from the U.S., UAE, Hong Kong and Singapore. We also plan to expand connectivity in these markets in the fourth quarter.
In addition, we recently announced an alliance with Maxis, a major mobile operator Malaysia. We are working together to launch a service in 2010 that will allow the 11 million Maxis subscribers to send money cross border remittances directly from their mobile phones.
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