The UK’s Post Office has announced it will no longer provide MoneyGram services following a significant cyber security breach.
MoneyGram, a global money transfer service, had been a longstanding partner of the Post Office, with plans to renew its partnership soon. However, a cyber security issue that disrupted MoneyGram services for several days last month led to the decision to end the deal.
In a message to Postmasters, Ed Dutton, the Post Office’s Product Portfolio Director, said: “Our contract with MoneyGram will expire at midnight tonight. MoneyGram services went offline globally following the serious cyber-attack that hit them on 20th September 2024.
“Services are still down across Post Office branches because we need to ensure that we understand the protective measures that MoneyGram have implemented following the incident. MoneyGram services also remain unavailable online in the UK.
“Post Office and MoneyGram have been in contract negotiations since June of this year and had expected to agree a new contract to roll-on from 1st October 2024. The contracting process was in the final stages when, unfortunately, MoneyGram suffered the cyber-attack.”
Dutton went on to explain that the Post Office had offered to extend its contract with MoneyGram for a shorter period, allowing both parties to focus on service renewal activities in the coming days.
He noted that this extension would have provided time to assess the potential long-term impact of MoneyGram’s recent cyber incident on customers, Postmasters and partners as the situation continued to develop.
However, MoneyGram declined the Post Office’s offer for a contract extension. In a message to Postmasters, the company expressed that it was “shocked and disappointed” by the Post Office’s communication, calling it “misleading” and claiming it violated the confidentiality of the existing agreement.
The message continued: “MoneyGram believes it had a binding agreement on a new 12-month extension with the Post Office. However, the Post Office leveraged our unforeseen cyber incident to materially alter the duration and terms of the agreement in a way that was detrimental to MoneyGram.
“Our cybersecurity experts have determined that the incident has no effect on any of our agents’ systems. We are pleased to report that we have resumed operations in every country outside of the UK and are working diligently to resume operations here.
“It is unfortunate the Post Office has taken this stance after our trusting partnership of over 25 years. We sincerely hope that we further the dialogue with the Post Office and can continue to work with you in the future.”
Despite being US-based, MoneyGram has a lot of European customers and this deal will be a big hit.
Earlier this year, MoneyGram partnered with Trustly to launch cardless payment options for millions of European users, leveraging the latter’s Open Banking platform.
