The story
MoneyGram International was formed when two businesses merged: Minneapolis-based Travelers Express and Denver-based Integrated Payment Systems Inc.
MoneyGram was established as a subsidiary of Integrated Payment Systems, later became an independent company, and was acquired by Travelers in 1998. In 2004, Travelers Express became what is today called MoneyGram International.
Travelers Express (1940–1997)
The Minneapolis-based Travelers Express Co. Inc. was founded in 1940. In 1965, Travelers Express was acquired by The Greyhound Corporation (later known as Viad Corp) and became the nation's largest provider of money orders before initiating a company reorganization plan in 1993.
MoneyGram Systems (1988–1997)
MoneyGram was formed in 1988 as a subsidiary of Integrated Payment Systems Inc. Integrated Payment Systems was a subsidiary of First Data Corporation, which was itself a subsidiary of American Express. In 1992, First Data was spun off from American Express and publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. First Data Corporation later merged with First Financial, the owners of rival Western Union. In order to approve the merger, the Federal Trade Commission forced First Data to sell Integrated Payment Systems.
Thomas Cook Global Foreign Exchange, under the stewardship of John Bavister, launched a re-engineered money transfer service in 1994. Branded as MoneyGram, the venture saw the partnering of the global travel giant with First Data Corp.
In 1996, Integrated Payment Systems, the nation's second largest non-bank consumer money transfer business, became its own publicly traded company and was renamed MoneyGram Payment Systems Inc. In 1997, James F. Calvano, former president of Western Union, became MoneyGram Payment Systems CEO. By the late 1990s, MoneyGram Payment Systems had served customers at over 22,000 locations in 100 countries.
MoneyGram International Ltd. was established in 1997 by MoneyGram Payment Systems Inc. and Thomas Cook, a year after the company had gone public. At the time when MoneyGram International was established, MoneyGram Payment Systems owned 51 percent of the company, while the other 49 percent was owned by the Thomas Cook Group.
MoneyGram International (1998–present)
In April 1998, Viad Corp acquired MoneyGram Payment Systems Inc. for $287 million. MoneyGram was then folded into Viad's Travelers Express in Minneapolis. In November 2000, the MoneyGram brand and business was sold to Travelex as part of its acquisition of Thomas Cook Financial Services for £400m. In 2003, Travelers Express gained full ownership of the MoneyGram network, including MoneyGram International. Later that year, Viad spun off Travelers Express as an independent company. In January 2004, Travelers Express was renamed to MoneyGram International Inc. In June 2004, Viad sold MoneyGram and it became a publicly traded, individual entity.
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By 2006, MoneyGram International had expanded internationally to include over 96,000 agents in regions such as the Asian-Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Central America. The company had also introduced additional services such as bill payment and online money transfers.
During the 2008 financial crisis, MoneyGram's shares fell 96% from 2007 to 2009. It lost more than $1.6 billion from investments in securities backed by risky mortgages in 2008, and the losses led the company to sell a majority stake to Thomas H. Lee Partners and Goldman Sachs in exchange for a cash infusion. During the drop, U.S. Bancorp shifted its money transfer services to Western Union. The company became profitable again in 2009.
Amid MoneyGram's turnaround, Pamela Patsley became the executive chairwoman of the company in January 2009 and was later named CEO in September of that year. In November 2010, MoneyGram officially relocated its global headquarters to Dallas, Texas. The company continues to maintain global operations and information technology centers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In 2014, after MoneyGram lost a relationship with Wal-Mart, it began restructuring to cut costs. From a peak in 2013 until late 2015, shares fell about 70%. MoneyGram closed a call center in Lakewood, Colorado resulting in over 500 layoffs, and closed its 376-person Brooklyn Center operation in 2015. MoneyGram moved numerous positions to Warsaw, Poland from its Colorado and Minnesota locations to cut costs further.
In 2015, the company's agent network in Africa reached 25,000 locations, including an agreement with the Mauritius Post Office.
Between late October 2016 and January 2017, MoneyGram's shares doubled in value. On January 26, 2017, Ant Financial Services Group announced a deal to acquire MoneyGram International for $880 million; the deal subsequently collapsed after it was rejected by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
On June 17, 2019, MoneyGram announced a partnership with Ripple to utilize the digital asset XRP for cross-border remittance. Within 6 months, in February 2021 MoneyGram announced the end of the partnership after the US Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple for violating investor protection laws; later that year MoneyGram announced a new partnership with Ripple's competitor Stellar to facilitate cross-border blockchain transactions settled in the USDC stablecoin.
In July 2020, Digital Financial Services LLC and MoneyGram have collaborated to provide overseas remittance services in the UAE. Through this partnership, eWallet consumers would be able to initiate real-time foreign money transfers to friends and families in more than 200 countries and territories around the world through a network of mobile wallet providers, bank account deposit facilities, and more than 350,000 walk-in locations.
In February 2022, MoneyGram agreed to be acquired for $1 billion in cash by Madison Dearborn Partners, a private equity firm. The acquisition was completed in June 2023.
From Wikipedia’s article on MoneyGram, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.6