western union digital transformation western union digital transformation

But its really all about allowing the manager to observe the way their employee works, whats easy about that job and whats hard about that job. [1] The first transcontinental telegraph was sent on October 24, 1861, from the Chief Justice of California to President Abraham Lincoln. How Your Small Business Can Be Managed With The Right Databases, Why Businesses Must Focus on Introducing Technology in the Workplace. [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. today more than 65% of Western Union's digital transactions originate on a mobile . And when you have that, it becomes easier to have a stronger level of influence than you might otherwise expect with a small team, because everyone in the organization is clear that, whether youre working directly with the WU Way team or not, your job is to find ways for continuous improvement. Its more about having the manager understand how the work actually gets done on the floor. Meanwhile, new fintech players like Transferwise are able to offer cash transfer services for a fraction of the price since their operations are 100% online. Navigate McKinsey's Kausik Rajgopal and Lang Davison recently sat down with Western Union's CEO to talk about its multicultural customer base (and . Digital is all about how we reach the customer. Many of its 150 million customers worldwide depend on money transfers to pay for food, electricity, medication, and other necessities. Nov 2011 - Present11 years 5 months. The digital transformation is helping Western Union emerge from a challenging two-year era. Jay Jaffin was just starting his role as Western Union's chief marketing officer when the pandemic arrived. Assignment: Driving Digital Transformation, AIG & Cyber Insurance Learning to Insure a Digital World, The First Transcontinental Telegram was sent to DC 155 Years Ago, Form 10-K for the year ended December 2017, How Blockchain Could Help Emerging Markets Leap Ahead, Beyond the Hype: What Blockchain could mean for Africa, Western Union is Testing Ripple and XRP for Money Transfers, Western Union Brings Money Transfer and Its Tricky Fees to Chat Apps, Emirates NBD, an almost perfect digital transformation, B2B business solutions (cross-border and cross-currency). 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. When fully realised, he says, it will give Western Union the agility it is seeking, while also having a positive impact on its bottom line. 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. Head of Information Technology & Digital Transformation Econet Wireless Zimbabwe Oct 2015 - Present 7 years 6 months. Western Union is one of the largest digital money firms, uniquely positioned to connect the cash and digital worlds across platforms, devices, borders, and currencies. The culture change has to be driven across teams to show how technology has enabled different and better outcomes. 2023Western Union Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Technology or Operations transformation . [8]. To address this new competitive landscape, Western Union sought an agility boost to accelerate innovation. Data safety. 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. The strategy is also to reduce costs; on-prem infrastructure and people running it is expensive and you need back-ups of everything, especially in financial services. Cookies help us deliver our services. However, Western Union doesnt view its established retail business as totally separate from the digital world. Really understand the business stakeholders problem and how you can fix or enable it. Network (IIN), Diversity Equity Leadership Team. It requires a change in process and culture, the adoption of a common lingo, executive buy-in, and a center of excellence to ensure enterprise-wide success. 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. What we are talking about is not cryptocurrency, it is not something that has to be mined. Hiring experienced developers was already hard, and the skills drought got even worse with the great resignation. [5]. Business Unit Represents Approximately 7% of Company Revenue . Western Union launched its digital banking app in Germany and Romania in Spring 2022, following 11 months of iterative development. Western Union's platform provides seamless cross-border flows and its leading global financial network bridges more than 200 countries and territories and over 130 currencies . Snowflake worked with Longitude to assess what it takes to lead in the data economy. Faced with numerous applications to deliver, the need to rapidly iterate customer experiences, and the steep learning curve for new Cloud DevOps toolchains, Western Union decided to evaluate low-code platforms. (2013) Comparing Media Systems beyond the Western World. Theyve complemented each other really well and been able to almost mentor each other, as well as building great relationships with the product groups. The Foundation is supported by the Western Union Company, its employees, Agents, and business partners, working to support education and disaster relief efforts as pathways toward a better future. Whats really nice about that is that its so visually obvious. That allowed us to go from ten people to about 50 change agents in the first wave, which will be able to support 2,500 employees and 4,000 vendor full-time employees within two years. Does it offer a more seamless customer experience? With a history of more than 170 years, the company has a presence in more than 200 countries and territories, connecting more than 120m people to one another and to the global economy, through cross-border money transfers in approximately 130 currencies. Poland followed later in 2022, while plans are at hand to launch Italy by the end of the year. Mazzaferro: Keep it simple. Our research identified 10 attributes of an organizations data infrastructure that enable it to take full advantage of the data economy, the global supply and, Editors note: This is part of a series about the data economy. InsurTech & Crypto projects as the world embraces CX, Business Transformation and Digital . Group, Infosys Revenue Management Platform for Banking, About Here is Swamy Sivasubramaniyan, Head of Financial Services and Settlement Platform for Western Union, discussing the digital transformation experience with Infosys and Oracle. Our App has grown to become one of the industrys most widely used international money transfer apps and a Top 20 finance app in the App Store., Not at all. In 1861 it sent the first transcontinental telegraph. Its in our DNA to think about global operations because Western Union covers the world.. Western Union has recently partnered with other digital platforms to expand its digital offerings. Thank you for this great post, Hans. Having to maintain two sets of procedures on-prem and cloud for 18 months to ensure business continuity is chief among them, while teams have had to escalate a company-wide transformation during a pandemic. His career span includes working with organizations like FIS, Western Union, HCL Technologies, CGI, Mahindra Satyam and iGate Global Solutions. Security, Infosys Because if you dont have the right data, your applications will struggle to provide the right business outcomes and customer experiences. NICE have announced Western Union, a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement, has advanced customer experience through improved . Created: 05-05-2021 - 17:15. Western Union operates in the increasingly competitive, rapidly changing payments sector, where new fintech players are changing how the market operates. In just 11 months, we delivered a full-service digital banking experience that expands our relationship with customers.. Lastly, how do you see digital continuing to drive your services in the future? 2023 Snowflake Inc. All Rights Reserved | If youd rather not receive future emails from Snowflake, unsubscribe here or customize your communication preferences, Snowflake for Advertising, Media, & Entertainment, unsubscribe here or customize your communication preferences. Enterprise Technology Operations Center Manager. Western Union has gained a comprehensive view of the customer while running the Data Cloud on AWS. Not just front-end, but back office and our contact center. Automation, Microsoft They essentially sponsor a team and loan the resources that are necessary. We started function by function, looking at individual deployments across our different groups in the company. [5] 2017 Annual ReportCEO Letter (noting Western Union has expanded its fund payout network to billions of bank accounts). Western Union launched its digital banking app in Germany and Romania in Spring 2022, following 11 months of iterative development. Why Do Companies Choose to Outsource Work? Hospitality, Waste Western Union. Digital transformation in Western Union must be driven from the top-down. The transformation of a legacy company whose roots lie in the era of the telegraph involves more than just lean deployments and agile methodologies. My team and I had thought of the future being digital, of course, but the pandemic really forced us to make it a reality for the business. In the past five years, theres been a leveling across applications and data. I want to see those same results in my organization. I think thats an indication of how well its really working across the company. Behind those market-shaper practices are the lean tools and behaviors we develop and encourage. ene. So, constant iteration and rapid delivery are crucial. 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]. - Access cash back rewards at the WU store. January 25, 2019 | Video. One of our most important tools is the floor walk. Commenting on the speed comparison of OutSystems compared to previous traditional development, Tom said, "On an earlier project, we had ten people working on a pricing and UX project. To accelerate application development, improve agility, and provide great digital experiences, the company chose OutSystems as its high-performance low-code platform. Western Union. 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. In a report on ERP modernization, the global market intelligence firm highlights how Western Digital . "As users turn to our services in bigger numbers and as many new digital players come to the market, we know we have to change," he says. Its one of the most widely used platforms from a data perspective and were expanding our relationship with Talend to start using some of its data quality products as well. Jaffin: Western Union has a culture of innovating to meet customer needs, and the past 12 months have shown us that quick pivots can drive lasting change. At its core is a migration from on-prem to a cloud-based infrastructure, which it believes is key to allowing the organisation to scale and evolve into a company with the clout of an established financial institution combined with the agility and flexibility of a modern FinTech. 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. Professors from HEC, ESCP business school, and leading carriers shared insights on . We know there are certain systems that we cannot just move to the cloud straight away such as the AS400 IBM mainframe, but weve managed to take the ecosystem that surrounds our legacy technology and move it to the cloud and we think we can get everything to the cloud before the end of the year. Maybe it started out as more of a push, where we were looking to come in and work with a team. Meeting the moment with solutions required Western Union to accelerate its own digital transformation. To explore this content and receive communications from Google, please sign in with an existing Google account. There are 13 of these practices, and thats really how were assessing success with the transformation across the organization. Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. Lean deployments are a big piece of our overall transformation program. Sub-Saharan Africa 3G and 4G mobile broadband coverage stands at 86% and 57% of the population, respectively. The executive team has done a great job of making it really clear across the company that this is something thats expected of you. Goldfinch Partners is a private equity firm investing in businesses specialising in digital transformation. An advantage of Western Unions omnichannel approach is that it includes all customers, whether they are integrated or not in the financial system: the banked, the underbanked, and the unbanked. Society Updated: 01-06-2022 - 11:45. 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.. Services, Data Digital transformation can refer to anything from IT modernization (for example, cloud computing), to digital optimization, to the invention of new digital business models. They have also triggered profound changes within global banking, demanding that lenders remain flexible, nimble, and innovative in their digital-banking strategies to meet customers' rapidly . She also has worked with ad agencies like Ogilvy and McCann. So we had to figure out how to continue to show up for customers while also ensuring everyones health and safely. The transformation of Western Digital to a Live Enterprise Modernization of legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications provides an opportunity for a technical upgrade as well as a transformation of the core business, according to IDC. Services, Consumer He shares his views on digital transformation and economic opportunities for all. COVID-19 has brought countless challenges, but its also caused us to focus all of our efforts around customers and reground ourselves in our mission. Digital transformation in Western Union must be driven from the top-down. 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. Others see blockchain as an opportunity to help emerging governments become efficient and transparent, for example, by serving as the official land title registration. As a company, Western Union is in the middle of a transformational moment. 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. OutSystems High-Performance Low-Code Platform Powers Western Union Digital Banking Solution 2 min. With my work with WEF, I was lucky enough to sit around a table recently with some important people and talk about how we can take this forward. We use OutSystems in multiple layers of our tech stack, says Tom. 35, No. Top retailers use AI-powered campaigns to engage their most valuable customers. Data and insights gave us the ability to make important strategic decisions in the throes of what could have been a panic. So its a real imperative across the top of the organization. We see ourselves as becoming a FinTech that can move quickly while being sure that our infrastructure and processes allow us to work at scale. Many CEOs are lured into spending too much time on legacy businesses, which dont need CEO oversight. Western Union could use existing retail outlets as nodes on a land register blockchain, which could bring in new sources of revenue to those retail stores. 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. Snowflake enables us to centralize our data and enable application and business processes to leverage it across the organization. Western Union offers digital transactions in 70 countries to move money around the world. Chief Data and Innovation Officer, Western Union, Enterprise-grade scalability and security, Cloud-based IT architecture based on microservices. Last year, the global-payment services giant completed 268 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide, for a total of $80 billion. Western Union Digital Services Enhanced in the UAE with Mobile App and Online Access; ITFC and Dubai Exports host B2B Forum to Promote Agri-Food Trade between Arab and African Countries under the Arab Africa Trade Bridges Program; GBM and Banfico partner to support the Kingdom's efforts for a more digitalized financial sector 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. Tom Mazzaferro, Chief Data Officer at Western Union together with Nick Halsey, CEO at Okera talk about the technology that Western Union has adopted to help build new products and Western Union, Chief Data Officer: Digital Transformation Initiatives (Part 3) | Cloud | cdomagazine.tech Increasingly, digital technology and mobile devices play a key role in these transactions. . But Western Union is missing the true potential of blockchain for its business. Some want to go to a retail store and pay cash. In the same way that they say it takes a whole village to raise a child, it takes an army of people with the right skillsets and approaches to undertake a challenge like this. Having found great success with its Marketing Cloud, Singh outlines his longer-term vision to connect a number of Western Unions central products. Digital Bulletin exists to tell the story. Western Union has innovated before. The second aspect is our agile work, where we spin up teams that have learned and are now experts in using agile methodologies for product launches or IT development. Western Union (NYSE: WU), a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments and Zain Cash, the award-winning mobile financia . Denver, Colorado. . Leadership. Pay for your transfer instantly with a debit or credit card** or start a money transfer and complete the payment in cash at a nearby agent location. Cortex, Infosys Most of the customers for remittance service (e.g. Not satisfied with the idea of incremental change, the company took a start-from-scratch approach, assembling an experienced team and transforming its infrastructure. 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. He also praises Snowflakes adaptability when it came to dealing with huge capacity increases. & Distribution, Media and 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). Meanwhile, innovators like Ant Financial(China) and M-Pesa(Kenya) are leveraging high mobile penetration rates in emerging markets, and are beginning to experiment with cross-border money transfers. Specifically, how Data, Editors note: This is part of a series of blogs about the data economy. Youre expected to come up with new ways of innovation to drive revenue growth across the organization. Team members were drawn from different continents and operating on different time zones. There were definitely times I was looking at costs and thinking how I was going to explain to finance, or my CFO, he says. It requires a change in process and culture, the adoption of a common lingo, executive buy-in, and a center . We set up virtual war rooms, met with our executive team daily to strategize, and spoke to customers every week to keep a pulse on their needs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Blockchain is technology that uses an open, distributed ledger to permanently verify and record transactions between two parties. We recently delivered a similar requirement to a higher standard using one OutSystems developer in just 15 days. As the transformation gets embedded into the organization, the businesses start to run their own agile deployments. These strategies are paying off. Reframe blockchain from a threat to an opportunity, by creating a new autonomous unit. Receive rewards. Seven months after Goldfinch Partners and The Baupost Group announced they were purchasing Western . Sector, Travel and Jay Jaffin was just starting his role as Western Unions chief marketing officer when the pandemic arrived. First, for continuity of services. And its not something you can achieve really quickly, its a multiple-year process. Today, our omnichannel platform places Western Union in a unique position where our physical network and our digital efforts combine to provide customers with a host of options to transfer money, whether in cash, card into billions of bank accounts, online, using our App or one of our 17 mobile wallet partners. Its an ecosystem of complementary platforms that enable a seamless, single customer experience I think thats such a powerful proposition..