western union digital transformation

A lot of our big data environment is still on-prem and the mission is to move that completely to the cloud by the end of the year. Western Union has recently partnered with other digital platforms to expand its digital offerings. Experience in leading digital products from either the financial services, payment, or fintech industries. Meridian, Infosys (2017) Monitoring Media Pluralism in Europe: Application of the Media Pluralism Monitor 2016 in the European Union, Montenegro and Turkey. For example, helping African countries develop official land registers could eliminate a huge barrier to investment and capital inflows (e.g., by resolving uncertain and disputed land titles). [10]Jeff John Roberts, Western Union is Testing Ripple and XRP for Money Transfers, Fortune, Feb. 14, 2018. Most of the customers for remittance service (e.g. Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. Now we are on track to achieve those gains and benefits that come with being more agile and being able to grow at scale, we can really begin to look forward and reap the rewards of the transformation.. Many CEOs are lured into spending too much time on legacy businesses, which don't need CEO oversight. Mazzaferro: Snowflake is enabling quite a bit around analytics, reporting, event triggers, and settlement across our card providers. The development speedand deployment easeprovided by OutSystems accelerates change and feedback cycles, which paves the way for continuous innovation. Western Union (WU) is a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments. Continue to partner with popular digital platforms to provide legacy C2C money transfer services. The international roll-out continues to other countries at pace. To learn more about the data economy, what your organization stands to gain from using data effectively, and how to become a Data Economy Leader, download the report overview, How to Win in Todays Data Economy. Meeting the moment with solutions required Western Union to accelerate its own digital transformation. The fusion of the digital and the physical, the irrepressible rise of new technologies. Rica, Hong By John Manning, International Banker. Western Union Digital Banking is offered by Western Union International Bank GmbH. For decades, Western Union has defended its global position by investing in regulatory compliance. Prior to implementing Snowflake in 2021, Western Unions data spanned 34 on-premises data warehouses, resulting in latency and operational burdens. Teams that may not previously have interacted with each other are now doing floor walks with each other. Why Do Companies Choose to Outsource Work? OutSystems provides the innovation and agility to accelerate the digital transformation of Western Union. While the pace of change has been considerable, the leadership team at Western Union has been focused on implementing a large-scale technology transformation. Industry experts were also drafted in to create the army that was required for this technology mission. It took six months to do the bare minimum. Deep divides in digital connectivity, internet use, and access remain. Discover the latest software purchases and digital transformation initiatives being undertaken by Western Union and its business and technology executives. NICE have announced Western Union, a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement, has advanced customer experience through improved . Media, Madison Square Others see blockchain as an opportunity to help emerging governments become efficient and transparent, for example, by serving as the official land title registration. Data quality is so important to us, we need to know who we are marketing to and that means our data has to be of the highest quality.. 9-30 (describing four types of innovations incremental, modular, architectural and radical classified by their impact on a business core components and the relationships between those core components). Management, Digital Workplace It's a physical branding and marketing component that few money-transfer providers can match but one that's of diminishing value in a digital world. We recently delivered a similar requirement to a higher standard using one OutSystems developer in just 15 days. The way we approached it was to use the central WU Way team for capability building. Lastly, how do you see digital continuing to drive your services in the future? It's a physical branding and marketing component that few money-transfer providers can match - but one that's of diminishing value in a digital world. Now that these pilots are winding down, its been easy to get the support across the organization to find the resources necessary to establish teams that can scale it out in different areas across the company. [11] Western Unions footprint of retail locations gives it a worldwide laboratory for experimenting with blockchain applications. UnionDigital Bank is the trusted bridge between innovation and regulation. Part of this agility drive involved Western Union migrating its legacy on-prem IT infrastructure to the Cloud. This is just one example of how blockchain could be an opportunity for Western Union. Western Union. Leading fintech, Mambu, provides the platform and engine that drives the core of Western Union's new digital bank. Thats really enabled a lot more collaboration across groups. How did you navigate those early moments? The central transformation team helps do the capability building in training those resources up, and then they run their own scaled-out deployment. - Earn My WU points. The reason for that is due to the huge increase in demand for our digital services as lockdowns were implemented across many different geographies. What does "digital transformation" mean to Western Union? The top challenge for businesses with digital transformation goals in 2023 is determining where their companies should direct spending on technologies, according to a BCG X report. People are asking us, Hey, can you come help me? When people send money to friends or family across the country or around the world, chances are good that Western Union is involved. Our leadership team remains true to our vision and values, putting customers' evolving needs at the center of our innovation and holding up trust and convenience as the hallmarks of our business. In 2017 SEED supported 20 projects, impacting 5,000 children and youth; we hope to support event more in 2018.. Provide value consistently every month and deliver new value and capabilities. Heute nutzen bereits rund 150.000 Anwender in Deutschland sowie in Rumnien, Polen und Italien die Western Union Digital Banking App fr ihre finanziellen Angelegenheiten - immer mit dem Ziel . 12. Wingspan, Infosys WU's platform provides seamless cross-border flows, and its leading global financial network bridges more than 200 countries and territories and over 130 currencies. Having got the right people in place, Singh and his team set about building a partner network to supercharge Western Unions technology evolution. When people from different departments do these floor walks together, theyre realizing that they actually have a lot more in common with each other or notice areas where they can collaborate that they didnt realize before. My role was to bring all of these different teams together and instil a culture that recognised it wasnt just about how fast we were going, but also about the quality of the product were delivering.. Youre now a year into your role as CMO and leading through a prolonged global crisis. Banco Santander Consumer Portugal Adopts OutSystems as its Digital Transformation Platform. Marketing tactics evolved to attract digital customers, who have a different profile from traditional retail customers. Seven months after Goldfinch Partners and The Baupost Group announced they were purchasing Western . Western Union began a mission to transform the settlement platform with streamlined retail and digital cross-border money transfer operations to overcome the challenges and constraints of their legacy settlement systems. An undisputed leader in the global payments space, Western Union is driving a company-wide technology transformation, underpinned by migrating its infrastructure from on-prem to the cloud. Western Union is the worlds first P2P company. When you see those people who are proactive and have aspirations, you are able to almost make them role models and build really effective ecosystems around them.. Each quarter our research team identifies on-prem and cloud applications that are being used by the 11000 Western Union employees from the public (Press Releases, Customer References . Convera. Board of Directors. First, Western Unions third party agents may try to thwart any concerted moves to digital platforms, seeing such a move as a threat to existing commission revenues. Transformation, Cyber Digital Transformation. Reframe blockchain from a threat to an opportunity, by creating a new autonomous unit. Build customized, secure, and scalable mobile banking apps. The partnership will enable funds to be sent from countries around the world to mobile wallets across Africa through the organization's licensed payment rails. As such, when Western Union embarked on its technology transformation, it was keen to recruit personnel who could help achieve its vision. Cortex, Infosys What we are talking about is not cryptocurrency, it is not something that has to be mined. Many CEOs are lured into spending too much time on legacy businesses, which dont need CEO oversight. Board Committees. That system is fine in a cash based economy, but is becoming increasingly cumbersome as digital payments take hold in emerging markets. de 2007 - actualidad16 aos 3 meses. [7]For a helpful overview of how Blockchain is being used in emerging markets, see Vinay Gupta & Rob Knight, How Blockchain Could Help Emerging Markets Leap Ahead, Harvard Business Review, May 17, 2017. Business Application Services, Service Experience Whats really nice about that is that its so visually obvious. Specifically, how Data, Editors note: This is part of a series of blogs about the data economy. Today customers can commence their journey on our mobile App, pay for their transaction digitally or opt to pay cash from any of our participating Western Union retail locations, use wu.com or go directly to any of the 1,200 agent locations or Western Union-owned locations in Austria[i]. The center of excellence keeps things on track and makes sure we follow a framework and are tracking the results, so that we can measure the impact of the transformation across the whole organization. There are 13 of these practices, and thats really how were assessing success with the transformation across the organization. OutSystems High-Performance Low-Code Platform Powers Western Union Digital Banking Solution 2 min. Dan Nordlander, senior vice president of Western Union Way Operations at Western Union, discusses his companys unique transformation journey with McKinseys Barr Seitz. Its in our DNA to think about global operations because Western Union covers the world.. And on our website, we added new support and wayfinding tools to ensure customers could quickly and easily access information. The aim of this paper is to sketch a brief history of complex digital transformation of media and . Discover how Santander Consumer Finance replaced 70% of their core IT systems in three years with OutSystems. your next, Infosys We also innovated to make our services more inclusive for customers by creating new ways to send funds digitally and offering real-time digital account payouts. Download the Western Union (WU) money transfer app and quickly start sending cash to Mexico and worldwide, 24/7! [8]David Thomas, Beyond the Hype: What Blockchain could mean for Africa, African Business Magazine, Feb. 26, 2018. With the blockchain environment, there may be value in the technology as it becomes more mature and efficient. The Western Union Foundation is actively supporting NGOs that help refugees and migrants around the globe through education and financial literacy. Digital transformation can refer to anything from IT modernization (for example, cloud computing), to digital optimization, to the invention of new digital business models. 8 (Managing the Strategy Development Process). People who knew how a team or a group worked before can come in and see its night-and-day different. But you say its about more than technology? Finacle, Infosys - Access cash back rewards at the WU store. It is our responsibility to enable businesses, problem solvers, regulators and communities to leverage fintech for the betterment of lives. The company, which has been in the money-transfer business since 1871, launched online transfers via WU.com in 2000 and got into mobile money transfers in 2007. We teach employees, and then they execute. As the centerpiece of Western Unions omnichannel vision, the Western Union App is increasingly the primary touchpoint for customers: today more than 65% of Western Unions digital transactions originate on a mobile device globally. Western Unions platform provides seamless cross-border flows and its leading global financial network bridges more than 200 countries and territories and over 130 currencies and 500K partner networks. Western Union is a partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and is a leading voice in the conversation of how to build a global payments ecosystem, which is stable and where remittances can be made much faster. Once a customer notarises their documents, they can be stored in a safe location and distributed across the blockchain network, so any regulatory authority or government can access that information. We position ourselves as creating opportunity for financial inclusion by bridging gaps in the financial services sector. If any of these should fit what you're looking for, consider exploring a career with Western Union. Its more about having the manager understand how the work actually gets done on the floor. Unless they can feasibly use technology to improve their cost structure, Im super bearish on Western Union. Africa's largest payment gateway, MFS Africa, has partnered with Western Union to enable individuals and businesses across the continent to receive money from over 200 countries and territories. Recently I talked to him about the companys rapid pivot to digital this past year, his biggest learnings, and what the future holds. Society Updated: 01-06-2022 - 11:45. Digital transformation in Western Union must be driven from the top-down. The new generation of customers, especially Millennials, want to find us in the ecosystem of messaging apps.. Western Union uses a central team to build new capabilities across the business. [9]Western Union recently dipped its toes into blockchain. Western Union has gained a comprehensive view of the customer while running the Data Cloud on AWS. The scale of change this represents for a business like Western Union is not to be underestimated; the company employs around 11,000 people and has more than 550,000 retail agents locations within . Profiles, Infosys Knowledge A hugely significant piece of the transformation has come from rethinking how Western Union communicates with its vast customer base. Ericsson will help accelerate Econet's digital transformation journey. As a company, Western Union is in the middle of a transformational moment. . Becoming digital first meant we needed to deliver fast, frictionless experiences, especially on mobile. A large proportion of Western Unions infrastructure has been migrated to the cloud, and Singh reveals a timeline to complete the programme of work. So we had to figure out how to continue to show up for customers while also ensuring everyones health and safely. "As a digital enabler and a pioneer in the digital transformation, we aspire to play a vital role in the vision of the Saudi . HELIX, Management Hearing from customers helped us focus our messaging on two key ideas: digital convenience and staying safe through contactless funds transfer. Looking back at the results of our work over the last couple of years across all of our deployments, you see some really impressive gains. The author approaches the problem using public. These are seismic factors currently redefining our world, earning their own epochal moniker: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. You stepped in as CMO just as COVID-19 was emerging, and I cant imagine that a global health crisis was what youd envisioned for your first 100 days. 1 (March 1990), pp. Their bread and butter business is charging hefty fees on remittances and their core advantage was a network of retail outlets and agents across the US and partners around the world to get cash from one family member to another. These agents typically manage retail stores across the world, and offer Western Union money transfer services in exchange for a commission. Western Union's stock price continued to climb the week of April 12 reaching $25.89, compared to a low of $21.66 in January. Its not done from the perspective of correction or a negative consequence. Youre expected to find ways to optimize your processes and drive value. Big data has helped Western Union merge data across multiple channels for years, for marketing and promotion, customer lifecycle management, compliance and fraud modeling. W ith the outbreak of a crippling global pandemic and a pronounced global economic slowdown, the last few years have been rather tumultuous for the world. Discover the latest data, insights, and inspiration from Think with Google. Western Union charges high fees since they need to cover rent and labor overhead. The executive team has done a great job of making it really clear across the company that this is something thats expected of you. We use OutSystems in multiple layers of our tech stack, says Tom. Salesforce has been such an important part of the digital experience journey.. Its important to understand that business stakeholders are customers of our data. The EU is helping to boost Europe's digital capacities and create new opportunities for businesses and consumers while safeguarding basic rights. Finance. Filipino workers abroad), they need to bring physical money somewhere, and most of the fintech companies in remittance space dont have their own channels (they often partner with local kiosks). Markets are perpetually shifting and change is unavoidable, but to keep up with those shifting tides companies need to stay focused on digital transformation. So we established a set of what we call market-shaper practices that we wanted to focus on. Commenting on the advantages of development on OutSystems, Tom says, We estimate that were getting new products to market at least twice as fast as competitors, and were probably using a tenth of the resources they are on front-end development. Western Union Uses AWS to Create Company-Wide Digital Transformation. Strategic partnerships working with platforms like Google is a critical piece of that. The culture change has to be driven across teams to show how technology has enabled different and better outcomes. He also praises Snowflakes adaptability when it came to dealing with huge capacity increases. Feb 7, 2023. Mohua Das Gupta - Head of Marketing, Tata CliQ. Before OutSystems, we typically released every six weeks. [3] Shelly Freierman, Telegram Falls Silent Stop Era Ends Stop, NY Times, Feb. 6, 2006. This is a powerful tool for our business and one of the key capabilities of our new infrastructure.. Fellahi sees the Messenger bot as a promising tool. We serve all customer segments: from digital natives who are never without their smartphones to the 4 billion people on earth the World Bank estimates arent online yet., Western Union is strongly committed to migrants and to refugees: migration is at the heart of our business. Jaffin: We engaged with tech partners like Google almost immediately to refine our go-to-market strategy. Jaffin: Its important for us to continue trying new technology that gets us closer to customers and their changing needs, like advanced analytics and other tools. Chief Data and Innovation Officer, Western Union, Enterprise-grade scalability and security, Cloud-based IT architecture based on microservices. Jaffin: Evolution meant expanding the ways in which customers experience the brand digitally. Reliable for over 170 years. This aims to support the transition of the region into a digital economy and bring the benefits of digital transformation, such as faster economic growth, more jobs, and better services. Governments pay close attention to cross-border money transfers, and heavily regulate these services to prevent fraud, tax evasion, and other criminal activities. Really understand the business stakeholders problem and how you can fix or enable it. In the past, JSON storage and analysis required specific JSON databases. After exceeding expectations in 2020 despite the outbreak of COVID-19, the world's largest currency exchange service Western Union looks set to exceed US$1 billion in total annual revenues for its digital business segment in 2021 a major milestone for the company and a first in the world of digital cross-border payments.. Western Union's shift toward digital shows little sign of relenting. Data and insights gave us the ability to make important strategic decisions in the throes of what could have been a panic. As an iconic brand for over 150 years, Western Union is constantly striving to innovate for their customers. Today, structured and semi-structured data can easily coincide. We scored ourselves as an organization on these market-shaper practices when we started the transformation in 2016. Salesforce has a value proposition that was immediately interesting because it allows you to build a single omnichannel journey that can be managed really efficiently when I want to make a change I only need to do so in one place. Singh is a proponent for a Central Bank Digital Currency, which he says is significantly different to the digital assets such as BitCoin and Ethereum, which can fluctuate wildly in value over short periods of time. Sydney Mahan, The First Transcontinental Telegram was sent to DC 155 Years Ago, Washingtonian.com, Oct. 25, 2016. Western Union International Banks CEO Peter Bucher firmly believes you can drive successful, innovative business while creating a better world for the community you live in. be to drive digital transformation and . For more details about how Western Union went from 34 on-prem data warehouses to pursuing a multi-cloud strategy based on Snowflake, read our case study. [11]See generally Rebecca M. Henderson & Kim B. Clark, Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms, Administrative Science Quarterly Vol. This does have privacy implications and hence needs to be vetted out with regulatory authorities around the world. And that could be at an operation site or it could be more of a frontline thing like a sales executive. Looking ahead, the Sales Cloud will be connected to the Marketing Cloud, which in turn is connected to our Care Cloud, so that whenever something happens across any of those products we are able to react in a way that suits that customer. Packaged Goods, Engineering Lean deployments are a big piece of our overall transformation program. Something we could take forward is a digital dollar, which we could make transferable all around the world with our vendors. Western Uniona global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and paymentsis driving a company-wide transformation, which includes migrating its infrastructure from on-prem to the Cloud. As weve done that, everyone has started to speak the same language, whether its talking about going to huddles, doing process confirmations, conducting one-on-one coaching, or maybe doing floor walks. Western Union's cross-functional tech teams pushed out expanded digital options and real-time visibility on the status of its retail locations worldwide. One moment later, in Shimla, a hill country city in India, close to the ridge of the Himalayan foothills, a cashier at the . Almost immediately, it was clear that with retail stores temporarily closed, digital would need to play a larger role in delivering service to customers. [12]Josh Constine, Western Union Brings Money Transfer and Its Tricky Fees to Chat Apps, TechCrunch.com, Feb. 4, 2016. During its February 2018 earnings call, CEO Hikmet Ersek announced that Western Union is experimenting with Ripple for settling transactions and for capital optimization, and is also testing Ripples native currency (XRP).[10]. Jay Jaffin was just starting his role as Western Unions chief marketing officer when the pandemic arrived. Furthermore, a chain of retail outlets is expensive. [5]. But it becomes more self-driven, and that really enables the scale. Thats not to say cloud is always cheap, it can be expensive but we have a very stringent Review Board to keep our costs in check, so cost reduction is something about which we are confident.. How do you start there and end up with a fully embedded transformation across a company of 12,000 people? We wanted plug-and-play convenience to integrate any technology.. The Baupost Group is a $31 billion Boston-based investment firm. [12]These kind of digital initiatives are good pursuits for current operational leaders, since they represent incremental or modular innovations to Western Unions existing product offerings. The digital transformation is helping Western Union emerge from a challenging two-year era. Data safety. He praises the vendor support and namechecks first AWS for enabling the organisation to quicken the pace of its procurement process and spin up workloads to the cloud faster than had originally been anticipated. Mazzaferro: Keep it simple. Singh also sees huge potential in the use of blockchain for specific use cases within financial services and payments, for example, helping with the Know Your Customer (KYC) process that is important to stopping money laundering and fraud and eliminating many of the checks that currently hold up cross-border payments. Technology, Industrial | Learn more about Rokas kudas's work experience, education, connections & more by visiting their profile on . Western Union (NYSE: WU), a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments and Zain Cash, the award-winning mobile financia . Union Pacific, the railroad company that transports chemicals, coal, food, minerals and automobiles in and around 23 Western U.S. states, has had two workhorses that toiled tirelessly for the past . As a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments, Western Union has to comply with a huge number of financial regulations. On March 1, Huawei held a "Digital Leadership Seminar" during Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 in Barcelona, Spain, attended by more than 60 high-level customers from global carriers, government enterprises, and KOL. Leaders across many industries and companies of all sizes report that one of their biggest challenges is siloed data. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Low-Code Application Platforms, 2023. Knowledge Institute, Chemical The partnership with Talend has evolved over the last few years and was originally established to provide our business and technology teams a fast and efficient way to build data pipelines. Others prefer to prepare a transaction online and then go to a retail location to pay cash. Services, Public He reveals that Western Union was using multiple companies for each of its email, in-app and SMS communication channels. Theyll be there to help you stay on track or course correct when you have troubles. For example, we began offering an option for telephone money transfer. To accelerate application development, improve agility, and provide great digital experiences, the company chose OutSystems as its high-performance low-code platform. To that end, Singh has built on an existing relationship to forge a highly valuable partnership with Salesforce and oversee the roll-out of its industry-leading Marketing Cloud. Improvements that we made to our apps digital customer experience, for example, helped it become one of the most downloaded apps among our peer set in 2020. Network (IIN), Diversity Equity In Austria our employees have put in place numerous initiatives such as German courses and mentoring programs, and we celebrated in March the first anniversary of SEED, a project supported by the Western Union Foundation in collaboration with the Austrian Ministry of Education and Teach for Austria Alumni Association.