But no innovative businesses yet? It’s all just building the platforms today? No major projects out there other than the ones that are building this infrastructure that might be useful for something some day?
Not really.
It’s not like there aren’t a whole bunch of digital alternatives to Western Union already (see below link). The barriers to taking Western Union’s business don’t lie in the “sending money from one Western Union facility to another” part of the process. If you already have money in a digital format (ie. you have a bank or a credit card or an account linked to your phone), it’s trivial to send it around the world for a modest fee already.
It’s getting money into that process (at the sending end) and out of the process (at the receiving end) that give Western Union an advantage - they provide a way that you can walk into a store with cash (or a debit card or credit card) in one place and walk out of a store with cash in another. Plus, they have a name brand - Coke isn’t Coke just only because it’s got better soda, after all. That’s why you use Western Union as your example of an international remittance service, rather than one of the many digital apps that compete with them. If it were easy to disintermediate Western Union just with a digital process for sending money, it would have happened long ago by now.
It’s the “last mile” service that’s key. I have dollars, and need to get pounds to a friend in London. There’s tons of ways to get wealth transferred from the U.S. to the UK. The charges are mostly for the services at the end - the exchange rate charges of a few percentage points for exchanging currency. But that happens with crypto as well - you have to go through a third party to convert your dollars to Bitcoin (or whatever), and then the receiving person has to go through a third party to convert the Bitcoin (or whatever) to pounds. No reason to think that’s going to be especially cheaper than the existing services that are out there.