The Western Union Company (WU)
Q4 2009 Earnings Call Transcript
February 3, 2010 8:30 a.m. ET

Executives

Michael A. Salop – Senior Vice President, Investor Relations
Christina A. Gold – President, Chief Executive Officer & Director
Hikmet Ersek – Chief Operating Officer
Scott T. Scheirman – Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer

Analysts

Ashwin Shirvaikar – Citigroup
Bryan Keane – Credit Suisse
Adam Frisch – Morgan Stanley
Christopher Mammone – Deutsche Bank Securities
Darrin Peller - Barclays Capital
Julio Quinteros – Goldman Sachs
Tien-Tsin Huang – JPMorgan Chase & Co.
James Kissane – Bank of America/Merrill Lynch
Robert Dodd – Morgan Keegan & Company, Inc.

Presentation

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the fourth quarter 2009 Western Union Company earnings conference call. My name is Valentine (ph) and I am your operator for today. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. We will facilitate a question-and-answer session towards the end of this conference. If, at any time during the call you require operator assistance, please press star followed by zero and a coordinator will be happy to assist you.

I would now like to turn the presentation over to your host for today’s call, Mr. Mike Salop, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please proceed, sir.

Michael A. Salop

Thank you, Valentine and good morning, everyone. Today’s call includes comments from Christina Gold, President and Chief Executive Officer, Hikmet Ersek, Chief Operating Officer, and Scott Scheirman, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. In addition to a review of 2009 fourth quarter and full-year results, we will discuss our outlook for 2010 and key long-term strategies and initiatives. After our comments we will have time for your questions.

As we indicated in our press release we have prepared slides to accompany this call and webcast. These slides can be found at www.WesternUnion.com under the Investor Relations tab and will remain available after the call.

I would like to remind you that today’s call is being recorded and that our comments include forward-looking statements. Please refer to the cautionary language in the earnings release and in Western Union''s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission including the 2008 Form 10-K for additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements.

During the call, we will discuss some items that do not conform to generally accepted accounting principles.

We have reconciled those items to the most comparable GAAP measures on our website www.WesternUnion.com under the Investor Relations section. All statements made by Western Union officers on this call are the property of The Western Union Company and subject to copyright protection. Other than the replay, Western Union has not authorized and disclaims responsibility for any recording, replay or distribution of any transcription of this call.

I would now like to turn the call over to Christina Gold.

Christina A. Gold

Thank you, Mike and welcome to everyone on the call. Overall, we were very pleased with our 2009 results. Although the global economic environment was challenging our business was stable and we were able to deliver on our financial outlook. We maintained strong margins and generated significant cash flow, demonstrating the strength of our business model. We also advanced key strategic initiatives that open up additional opportunities with new customer and market segments.

Importantly, we posted another year of market share gains in our C2C business, increasing our cross border remittance market share from 17% in 2008 to an estimated 18% in 2009. We have increased our share by over 300 basis points since 2006 with significant gains each year.

Our ‘Yes’ marketing campaign contributed to the share gains and drove uniformity of the Western Union brand image and marketing. The campaign was launched across 200 countries and territories in over 50 languages and drove strong brand awareness. We saw large jumps in key countries such as Germany which improved unaided awareness by eight percentage points and India where awareness increased to over 90%. The campaign also helped us gain efficiencies in our marketing spend.