Western Union (NYSE: WU) reported Q1 EPS of $0.44, $0.01 worse than the analyst estimate of $0.45. Revenue for the quarter came in at $1.21 billion versus the consensus estimate of $1.2 billion.

President and CEO Hikmet Ersek said, “2021 is an important year for Western Union and we got off to a healthy start led by the continued strong growth of our market-leading digital business that generated over $240 million of revenue in the first quarter, putting us on track to exceed $1 billion of digital revenue this year. While additional waves of COVID-19 continue to affect countries around the world, we are optimistic that conditions may continue to improve over the year, supporting the momentum of our business and allowing us to achieve our 2021 financial outlook.”

Ersek added, “Our growth strategy has positioned us well for today’s dynamic environment and to lead the digital transformation of cross-border, Consumer-to-Consumer payments, and also leverage our capabilities in the rapidly growing cross-border payments market across different use cases. We remain focused on executing, evolving, and investing behind our strategy to ensure that we can capitalize on these exciting growth opportunities and develop an ecosystem of services centered around cross-border financial transactions.”

CFO Raj Agrawal stated, “We are encouraged by our first quarter performance that puts us on track to achieve our 2021 financial outlook. Our digital consumer business maintained the elevated levels of growth that we saw last year, while trends for our retail consumer business and Business Solutions segment improved sequentially. We also delivered operating margin of 19%, despite making significant investments in initiatives that were delayed in 2020 due to the effects of COVID-19, and we resumed returning cash to investors through share repurchases. Given our solid start to the year, we are affirming our revenue and operating margin financial outlook and raising our GAAP EPS financial outlook for 2021.”

GUIDANCE:

Western Union sees FY2021 EPS of $2.00-$2.10, versus the consensus of $2.05.

The Company today reaffirmed its 2021 financial outlook for revenue growth and operating margin and increased the GAAP EPS outlook by $0.06 reflecting the impact of two items realized in the second quarter of 2021 including the sale of an investment, partially offset by expenses related to the early retirement of the Company’s notes due in 2022. Excluding the impact of these two items, the 2021 EPS outlook is unchanged. The outlook provided today assumes no material worsening in current global macro-economic conditions or the COVID-19 pandemic.

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