The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU) is a financial services and communications company based in the United States. Its North American headquarters are in Englewood, Colorado, and its international marketing and commercial services headquarters are in Montvale, New Jersey. Until it discontinued the service, this company was the best known US company in the business of exchanging telegrams.

Western Union has a number of divisions, with products such as person-to-person money transfer, money orders, and commercial services. As of June 9, 2006, the company has 270,000 Western Union agent locations in over 200 countries and territories. Reported revenues top $3 billion annually.

History
   Western Union was founded in Rochester, New York, in 1851 as The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company.

After a series of acquisitions of competing companies by Hiram Sibley & Don Alonzo Watson the company changed its name to Western Union Telegraph Company in 1856 at the insistence of Ezra Cornell, one of the founders of Cornell University , to signify the joining of telegraph lines from coast to coast.

Western Union completed the first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861. In 1865 it formed the Russian American Telegraph in an attempt to link America to Europe, via Alaska, into Siberia, to Moscow.

It introduced the first stock ticker in 1866, and a standardized time service in 1870. The next year, 1871, the company introduced its money transfer service, based on its extensive telegraph network. In 1879, Western Union left the telephone business, having lost a patent lawsuit with Bell. As the telephone replaced the telegraph, money transfer would become its primary business.

When the Dow Jones Transportation Average stock market index for the NYSE was created in 1884, Western Union was one of the original eleven companies tracked.

In 1914 Western Union offered the first charge card for consumers; in 1923 it introduced teletypewriters to join its branches. Singing telegrams followed in 1933, intercity fax in 1935, and commercial intercity microwave communications in 1943. In 1958 it began offering Telex to customers. Western Union introduced the 'Candygram' in the 1960's, a box of chocolates accompanying a telegram featured in a commercial with the rotund Don Wilson. In 1964, Western Union initiated a transcontinental microwave beam to replace land lines.

Western Union became the first American telecommunications corporation to maintain its own fleet of geosynchronous communication satellites, starting in 1974. The fleet of satellites, called Westar, carried communications within the Western Union company for telegram and mailgram message data to Western Union bureaus nationwide. It also handled traffic for its Telex and TWX (Telex II) services. The Westar satellites' transponders were also leased by other companies for relaying video, voice, data, and facsimile(fax) transmissions.

Due to declining profits and mounting debts, Western Union slowly began to divest itself of telecommunications-based assets starting in the early 1980s. Due to deregulation at the time, Western Union began sending money outside the country, re-inventing itself as "The fastest way to send money worldwideSM" and expanding its agent locations internationally.

In 1986, Western Union and GTE became owners of Airfone.

Western Union was bought by First Financial Management Corporation in 1994, which a year later merged with First Data Corporation. On January 26, 2006, First Data Corporation announced plans to spin Western Union off as an independent, publicly traded company. Western Union's focus will remain money transfers. The next day, Western Union announced that it would cease offering telegram transmission and delivery, the product most associated with the company throughout its history. This was, however, not the original Western Union telegram service, but a new service of First Data under the Western Union banner; the original telegram service was discontinued after Western Union Corp.'s bankruptcy.

The spinoff was completed in December and Western Union is now an independent, publicly traded company.

Western Union is also the name of a ship that worked for the same company laying telegraph cable in the Caribbean and South America. She is currently working in Key West, Florida, where she was built and launched. The Western Union is 130 feet long and weighs 91.91 tons and is currently configured as a passenger vessel.

On September 10, 2007, Los Angeles area immigrant and community organizations joined the Transnational Institute for Grassroots Research and Action (TIGRA) to launch a nationwide boycott against Western Union. This boycott was scheduled two days before a general consumer boycott by immigrants. Groups accuse Western Union of charging exorbitant fees while failing to adequately reinvest in immigrant communities. The community organizations demand that Western Union abandon its "predatory financial practices" or face an ongoing boycott.

Immigrant advocates called for Western Union to adopt a Transnational Community Benefits Agreement (TCBA). According to the advocacy group, the agreement would "lower remittance fees, establish fairer exchange rates, and provide for community reinvestment." According to the advocacy group, Western Union and other money transfer agencies often function as the primary banking service in immigrant communities, yet they remain unregulated by the Community Reinvestment Act and are unaccountable to their primarily low-wage customer base.