The Scoop
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is bringing his populist bent to bear on a little-noticed merger.
Mamdani is urging New York State’s top financial regulator to block Western Union’s $500 million deal for Intermex, a money transferrer that mostly services immigrants sending remittances back to Latin America. The mayor says the merger will reduce competition and raise prices for some of the lowest-earning New Yorkers.
“This merger threatens to impose a new private tax on these same remittances, in the form of higher, supracompetitive prices that will flow directly to Western Union’s corporate coffers,” Mamdani wrote in a letter to the New York State Department of Financial Services late last month, according to a copy viewed by Semafor.
Mamdani’s efforts indicate the influence that top trustbuster and mayoral adviser Lina Khan is already wielding within New York City’s government. Khan was part of the mayor’s transition and while she doesn’t have a formal position in the administration, remains an unpaid adviser to Mamdani on his economic agenda.
The merger requires state financial regulators like DFS to approve the transfer of licenses from Intermex to Western Union. City Hall doesn’t have any official say, though Mamdani’s star turn and ability to command attention give him a soapbox from which he’s taken aim at the price of hot dogs at Yankee Stadium and said he’ll be keeping a close eye on World Cup tickets for signs of price gouging.
Step Back
As the Trump administration has stepped back from antitrust enforcement, state — and now local — officials are moving in. State attorneys general are pursuing antitrust cases, dropped or ignored by the Justice Department, against the tech companies HPE and Juniper and broadcasters NexStar and Tegna. California’s attorney general is investigating the pending merger of Paramount and Warner Bros., and 34 state AGs are trying to break up ticketing giant LiveNation, after the Justice Department stopped short of that outcome.
“Although the [Western Union-Intermex] merger appears to be facially illegal based on long-standing Supreme Court precedent, the Trump Administration has declined to challenge the merger on antitrust grounds, or even issue a second request to obtain additional information,” he wrote. (The waiting period expired in October, two months after the deal was announced.)
Western Union didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
Know More
Sam Levine, the Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, is expected to make remarks later Wednesday about the Mayor’s efforts.
Intermex is small, with just 4.5 million users to Western Union’s 150 million, but New Yorkers form a big chunk of its mostly Latin American customer base. Intermex controls roughly a third of the money channels between the US and both Ecuador and Nicaragua, “winning customers away from Western Union,” Mamdani wrote.