Talend is our backbone for that work and have really evolved their product to meet our needs.. After the catastrophic explosion in Lebanon in 2020, the two companies worked together to build data pipelines to help those affected by the incident and provide support to agents in the area. I also agree with you that the competitive advantage of Western Union is a broad network of retail footprint across the world. Head of Information Technology & Digital Transformation Econet Wireless Zimbabwe Oct 2015 - Present 7 years 6 months. Specifically, how Data, Editors note: This is part of a series of blogs about the data economy. By John Manning, International Banker. Services, Public 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. Data privacy and security practices . Using OutSystems for customer-facing digital experiences, back office, and workflow solutions, Western Union launched new digital banking services in two countries in just 11 months. We have a lot of great ideas in terms of investments to drive that topline revenue growth, but we needed ways to fund those. With OutSystems, we deploy twice every week. Every year or two we rescore ourselves in a company-wide exercise to see where were making progress and where were falling behind. Then think about the products you want to offer and how it can be a data-enabled product, such as being hyper-personalized. Snowflake: What do you see changing now that your organization is better able to share data? Were there tools or technology that were particularly helpful in your transformation? Its an ecosystem of complementary platforms that enable a seamless, single customer experience I think thats such a powerful proposition.. We're making content recommendations better for thousands of readers. Western Union has innovated before. These are seismic factors currently redefining our world, earning their own epochal moniker: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Low-Code Application Platforms, 2023. 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). Why Do Companies Choose to Outsource Work? Inclusion, Bloomberg ; With the solution, Western Union launched a state-of-the-art digital . Build customized, secure, and scalable mobile banking apps. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. What does "digital transformation" mean to Western Union? Hospitality, Waste Nov 2011 - Present11 years 5 months. And still others want to do it all online.. Us, Terms Manufacturing, Information Services Transformation, Cyber A hugely significant piece of the transformation has come from rethinking how Western Union communicates with its vast customer base. Western Union is the worlds first P2P company. Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. 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. From the earliest days of the pandemic, innovating the companys services to meet new patterns of consumer demand was an urgent matter. Last year, the global-payment services giant completed 268 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide, for a total of $80 billion. 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. Western Union has recently partnered with other digital platforms to expand its digital offerings. Thats changing. [9]Clayton M. Christensen & Michael E. Raynor,The Innovators Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003), Ch. 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. Beyond the public health crisis, COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on personal finances, causing poverty levels and inequality to rise globally. Society Updated: 01-06-2022 - 11:45. Navigate 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. Digital transformation starts with people, which is a useful reminder that . For example, we began offering an option for telephone money transfer. It took six months to do the bare minimum. We are also launching new products into the market, including a pilot for digital banking services in select markets in Europe and a revamped loyalty programme, which require us to capture data from our central warehouses to drive decision making, marketing and customer acquisition. 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. Swanback said a . Experts at TCS and Western Union share the trends that are affecting digital transformation in financial services. Western Union is trying to use Blockchain as an incremental or modular innovation, when in fact it could be an architectural orradical innovation (see chart below) introducing entirely new businesses that fit well into Western Unions existing capabilities. Engaged in problem resolution of complex . few clicks, you can use OutSystems to bring your visions to life. Western Union's cross-functional tech teams pushed out expanded digital options and real-time visibility on the status of its retail locations worldwide. Here are 4 steps they follow, Why durable solutions are needed to build the future of audiences, A data-privacy team can support your privacy transformation. 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. Western Union's Customer Journey Digital Transformation Fueled by NICE - Innovative NICE Nexidia Customer Journey Optimisation provides powerful analytics to enhance customer experience. For example, in 2016 Western Union integrated money transfer options with messanging apps WeChat and Viber, allowing users to send small amounts of money through the apps. Mazzaferro: In the past, the thinking in the industry has often been that applications are king, and that data flows through the applications. 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. Hearing from customers helped us focus our messaging on two key ideas: digital convenience and staying safe through contactless funds transfer. Western Union can leverage such physical presence to win this new innovative space. For example, De Beers is trying to create a diamond blockchain for registration and authentication, to prevent the spread of conflict diamonds. The Transformation Story of Western Digital. Increasingly, digital technology and mobile devices play a key role in these transactions. They essentially sponsor a team and loan the resources that are necessary. 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. Singh was given autonomy to mould his teams, combining the skills already at Western Union with external talent, many of which were from a consulting background, resulting in a diverse and varied team, which he says proved invaluable. Africa's largest payment gateway, MFS Africa, has partnered with Western Union to enable individuals and businesses across the continent to receive money The paper analyzes the issues of digital transformation in the European Union in such key dimensions as financing digitalization and implementing public policy to bridge the digital divide in the EU member countries. Heres how, Customers want control over their data and wont hesitate to switch brands to get it, Global Insights Briefing: Holiday takeaways for marketers, From solar panels to spa days, see how 2022s top searches set the stage for 2023. Western Union is working alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS Partners to transform and expand its business, including the launch of a new digital bank. Our technology platform is founded on a Hadoop big data technology cluster that is used for conversion analysis, risk statistical modeling, payments and risk data processing, Fellahi explains. For decades, Western Union benefited from network effects as it added density and new geographies. Western Union will likely face internal resistance from three sources. So, constant iteration and rapid delivery are crucial. He also praises Snowflakes adaptability when it came to dealing with huge capacity increases. There were definitely times I was looking at costs and thinking how I was going to explain to finance, or my CFO, he says. While WU is considered a global leader in their space, competitive insights and . Now data is the driver and applications are being developed to handle that data and represent it to business stakeholders to make it consumable. DENVER-(BUSINESS WIRE)-The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU), a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments, today announced that the Company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire a minority stake in fast growing Saudi Digital Payments Company, or stc pay, a fully owned subsidiary of Saudi Telecom Company. His career span includes working with organizations like FIS, Western Union, HCL Technologies, CGI, Mahindra Satyam and iGate Global Solutions. [2] Westar 1, Wikipedia, accessed April 2018. Customers can send and receive money in a fast, reliable and convenient manner., We are proud to offer the same omnichannel choice in Austria. 1 (March 1990), pp. Strategic partnerships working with platforms like Google is a critical piece of that. Introducing the next-generation operating model, Winning with your talent-management strategy. In the past several years, the Englewood, Colo.-based company has made a point to develop and [] Western Union has gained a comprehensive view of the customer while running the Data Cloud on AWS. Jaffin: Our company mission is to enable financial transfers between people anywhere and everywhere; we had a responsibility to continue to deliver on that. And if Western Union doesnt embrace and transform along with those technologies, it will fade away just like the telegraph. As the figure below shows, five components are needed to execute an organization's digital transformation: 1. 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. Western Union must adapt to an increasingly mobile world: if Western Union doesn't develop low-cost mobile money transfers, Western Union won't be able to compete . Patrick Gauthier, CEO of Convera, formerly known as Western Union Business Solutions. If you are a new customer: now you can transfer your FIRST money transfer for FREE*. InsurTech & Crypto projects as the world embraces CX, Business Transformation and Digital . Western Union Digital Banking is offered by Western Union International Bank GmbH. It has become one of the leaders in Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) technology and the majority of the data moving across our ecosystem is now powered by Talend. Mazzaferro: Snowflake is enabling quite a bit around analytics, reporting, event triggers, and settlement across our card providers. How did you evolve for digital convenience and safety? In 2011, Western Union opened an office in San Francisco to ramp up its digital operation. Western Union must adapt to an increasingly mobile world: if Western Union doesnt develop low-cost mobile money transfers, Western Union wont be able to compete with new competitors like Ant Financial and Zelle. Jaffin: We engaged with tech partners like Google almost immediately to refine our go-to-market strategy. Commenting on the advantages of development on OutSystems, Tom says, "We estimate that we're getting new products . The central transformation team helps do the capability building in training those resources up, and then they run their own scaled-out deployment. Western Union's digital banking platform is a complex ecosystem of partnerships from across the technology and fintech landscape. Western Union International Bank's CEO Peter Bucher firmly believes you can drive successful, innovative business while creating a better world for the community you live in. Western Union has had a compound annual growth rate above 25 percent over the past five years, since the launch of the digital division. Leading fintech, Mambu, provides the platform and engine that drives the core of Western Union's new digital bank. Board of Directors. Microservices, Digital Process Because if you dont have the right data, your applications will struggle to provide the right business outcomes and customer experiences. The culture change has to be driven across teams to show how technology has enabled different and better outcomes. Continue to partner with popular digital platforms to provide legacy C2C money transfer services. People are asking us, Hey, can you come help me? My mission is to empower people to become economically self-reliant. The transformation of a legacy company whose roots lie in the era of the telegraph involves more than just lean deployments and agile methodologies. Business Application Services, Service Experience [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. Fellahi sees the Messenger bot as a promising tool. The Western Union Foundation is actively supporting NGOs that help refugees and migrants around the globe through education and financial literacy. Snowflake enables us to centralize our data and enable application and business processes to leverage it across the organization. Product Director, United States Money Transfer. Revenue from Western Union's digital money transfer services spiked from $600 million in 2019 to over $850 million in 2020. Others see blockchain as an opportunity to help emerging governments become efficient and transparent, for example, by serving as the official land title registration. Thank you for this great post, Hans. Top-down prioritization of digital transformation. 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. [3], Western Union operates in three segments, with most of its revenues (79%) coming from the C2C segment: [4], Western Union became the dominant player in cross-border C2C money transfers through a platform strategyit connected people who wanted to send money across borders. 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. 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. It is far more stable than that and can be used for near instant settlements across the board, while providing liquidity to Reserve Banks. Funds can be picked up in cash at half a million Western Union agent locations worldwide or transferred electronically to the recipients bank account or to a debit card linked to a digital wallet. 2023Western Union Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved. When people send money to friends or family across the country or around the world, chances are good that Western Union is involved. Companies like Venmo(PayPal) and Zelle(joint venture by several large U.S. banks) have deep pockets, but so far are mostly competing in domestic payment markets. The relationship with Talend has enabled Western Union to help its global customer base in times of real need. Second, Western Unions employees may not have the knowledge or training to effectively lead Western Unions digital transformation, and may resist digital initiatives or operational changes. UnionDigital Bank is the trusted bridge between innovation and regulation. For more than 170 years Western Union has been helping people send money all over the world. McKinsey's Kausik Rajgopal and Lang Davison recently sat down with Western Union's CEO to talk about its multicultural customer base (and . That means we can onboard new developers and have them productive much faster, and weve got fewer knowledge silos in the development team., Moreover, low-code development on OutSystems helps Tom fight back in the war for digital talent. Big data has helped Western Union merge data across multiple channels for years, for marketing and promotion, customer lifecycle management, compliance and fraud modeling. Rapid growth in technology was making it easy for international money transfers to take place online, Fellahi recalls. Poland followed later in 2022, while plans are at hand to launch Italy by the end of the year. The difference with OutSystems is that we can do that fast and at scale, deploying experiences that are fast to load, reliable, and secure. Security, Infosys arrow_forward. In the latest step in its digital journey, Western Union recently launched a bot that enables Facebook Messenger users in the United States to send money to more than 200 countries, across 130 currencies, from within the messaging app. Western Union is to shed its Business Solutions unit, with investment firms Goldfinch and Baupost set to acquire the business for $910 million in cash. Dan Nordlander, senior vice president of Western Union Way Operations at Western Union, discusses his companys unique transformation journey with McKinseys Barr Seitz. One of the benefits that weve really seen as weve gone through these first two years of our journey is what happens when we get everyone speaking the same language. When people send money to friends or family across the country or around the world, chances are good that Western Union is involved. One trend that has emerged as a result is the growing role of digital money transfers among people who may not otherwise use those services. 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. The pandemic really accelerated the digital transformation journey; the plan was for it to be rolled out in three years but that timeframe became 18 months, Singh tells Digital Bulletin. Theyll be there to help you stay on track or course correct when you have troubles. (2017) Monitoring Media Pluralism in Europe: Application of the Media Pluralism Monitor 2016 in the European Union, Montenegro and Turkey. Contributed to establishing Quality Assurance, Training and Documentation strategy and processes for AML Operations functions. 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. Digital is all about how we reach the customer. They can include creating strategy placemats (one-page strategy overviews that are easily shared), frequent team huddles, one-on-one coaching, and process confirmation. Originally, the capacity of our on-prem environments wasnt projected to hit capacity until 2022, but we could see that point was going to be reached in 2020, so that meant a real acceleration.. 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. This will enable the company to maintain its high . As such, when Western Union embarked on its technology transformation, it was keen to recruit personnel who could help achieve its vision. And on our website, we added new support and wayfinding tools to ensure customers could quickly and easily access information. 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. It works with Talend to streamline data movement in compliance with GDPR across financial, reconciliation, auditing and trading partners. Some changes that used to take a month, we now deliver in around 48 hours.. The digital transformation is helping Western Union emerge from a challenging two-year era. I want to see those same results in my organization. I think thats an indication of how well its really working across the company. Best practices were also key. The reason for that is due to the huge increase in demand for our digital services as lockdowns were implemented across many different geographies. Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. 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. In [] [1] The first transcontinental telegraph was sent on October 24, 1861, from the Chief Justice of California to President Abraham Lincoln. Dan Nordlander is senior vice president of Western Union Way Operations at Western Union, and Barr Seitz is senior manager of editorial and digital communications in McKinseys New York office. Teams that may not previously have interacted with each other are now doing floor walks with each other. Now its more pull. Cloud services such as cloud data platforms have become cost-efficient, high performance calling cards for any business that leverages big data. Singh was brought in to help facilitate that leap, drawing on his expertise with business transformations, technology management, data architecture and collaborative working, backed up by various consulting roles at Deloitte, IBM and Accenture. This seems to be a typical BSSE case in which it is hard for the incumbent to disrupt its business, since the innovation may threaten the current profitable business. Many of its 150 million customers worldwide depend on money transfers to pay for food, electricity, medication, and other necessities. One moment later, in Shimla, a hill country city in India, close to the ridge of the Himalayan foothills, a cashier at the . Industry experts were also drafted in to create the army that was required for this technology mission. The Baupost Group is a $31 billion Boston-based investment firm. Complete your profile for personalized recommendations, Managing Director, U.S. Financial Services at Google. 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 The map, Barmer and Newman say, is designed to do precisely that turn the western Pennsylvania fish-fry culture into an adventure stamped onto the landscape that fosters community engagement . Western Union has the infrastructure to help make that a reality. 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). [7]While cryptocurrencies are an obvious threat to Western Unions cross-border money transfers, Blockchain also can be used in a range of imaginative ways. Watch this tech inequality series featuring scholars, practitioners, & activists, Sign up for the Digital Initiative Newsletter. Profiles, Infosys Knowledge Recently I talked to him about the companys rapid pivot to digital this past year, his biggest learnings, and what the future holds. Mohua Das Gupta - Head of Marketing, Tata CliQ. Entertainment, Professional In the past five years, theres been a leveling across applications and data. Korea, United And when that happens, they start to see further opportunities for continuous improvement, leading them to new ideas about things they can do to improve efficiency or effectiveness. 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. Guide for Suppliers, Select These are things like rewards and recognition, top-down innovation, and consequence management. Last year, the global-payment services giant completed 268 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide, for a total of $80 billion. This is a powerful tool for our business and one of the key capabilities of our new infrastructure.. When we started the transformation project, we came at it from the perspective of this being a cultural transformation just as much as a process 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. The role of CDO needs to encompass more than data management and data governance, more than even enabling the pipeline and managing the environments. Youre now a year into your role as CMO and leading through a prolonged global crisis. 35, No. . Finacle, Infosys Join us to learn how your organization can become a leader in the Data Economy and the business benefits that result. 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. 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. Consumers can 'Send Now, Pay Later' by borrowing up to AUD 2000 through Beforepay's wage-advance product on Western Union's digital channels. We caught up with Mazzaferro to dive deeper into how the Data Cloud enables ongoing digital transformation at Western Union: Snowflake: Tom, as CDIO you lead the charge on keeping Western Union at the forefront of data economy leadership. Salesforce has been such an important part of the digital experience journey.. Updated on. Others prefer to prepare a transaction online and then go to a retail location to pay cash. Marketing tactics evolved to attract digital customers, who have a different profile from traditional retail customers.

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